Re: [Chicken-users] Possibly of interest to some, I put a couple of my chicken based projects online ...

[matt welland]

On Mon, 2011-03-14 at 08:24 -0600, Alan Post wrote:
> What are you using that test harness for?  That program seems really
> neat, would you mind talking more about it?
> 
> -Alan

Hi Alan,

Thanks for asking, I'm dangerously enthused to talk about megatest and
its cohort logpro :) 

For my own projects I run a suite of tests (mostly pretty simple but
fairly robust) to ensure they compile and run correctly on several
versions of Linux (ARM and Windows I run manually ... must automate some
day ...). I like to know what the last apt-get upgrade broke. I was also
running some tests on AFS, NFS and glusterfs but that is not really
necessary any longer. I used the old megatest to run some genetic
algorithm experiments for solar collector design (or I suppose
stochastic hill climber) but that project now languishes in the heap of
"things to finish someday". 

For a while I was playing with various distributions for an IPAQ using
openembedded and scratchbox and I was using the predecessor to megatest
to run some tests since stuff would break often. ASIDE: my son voted for
the name "testalot" but I'll liked the irony of the grandiose name
"megatest" given its few hundred lines of code. I welcome opinions on
the name.

The "design pattern", if you will, of launching a test and piping the
output through logpro for analysis seems to work great for about 90% of
the testing I want to do. The "test" egg is great for actual unit tests
with scheme code but even there it is sometimes nice to pump the log
through logpro.

I'm also using megatest and logpro together at work to run a suite of QA
tests but that is only until we get the "real" test system written. The
appeal of scheme is hard to communicate and unfortunately the megatest
code is kinda crufty and has some rough edges which doesn't help when it
comes time to sell it to colleagues.

Megatest and logpro have their roots in RTL validation where we ran
hundreds of Verilog simulations generating many 100's of megs of logs
over a whole bunch of machines. Some of the simulations would take days
and the predecessor to logpro would be watching the logs as they were
generated and would kill the simulation if it detected failures. This
was before the days of SystemVerilog. I've also used logpro to analyze
DRC and LVS logs (here the waiver mechanism was particularly handy).
Both tools have had various incarnations in Perl, Ruby and now Chicken
and are now licensed GPL.

Phew. That was fun to write. I wonder how many readers will make it this
far? :)

> On Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 09:51:51PM -0700, matt welland wrote:
> > I've been waiting for some free time to "clean it up" before making some
> > of my projects public but obviously that day will never come. So, for
> > better or for worse I've put a few of my little projects at
> > http://www.kiatoa.com/fossils/opensrc just in case they are of use to
> > someone. 
> > 
> > Cheers,
> > 
> > Matt
> > -=-
> > 
> > 
> > 
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