RFR: JDK-8176084 Developer-friendly run-test facility (original) (raw)

Magnus Ihse Bursie magnus.ihse.bursie at oracle.com
Thu Mar 2 21:25:49 UTC 2017

On 2017-03-02 15:37, Erik Joelsson wrote:

On 2017-03-02 14:48, Magnus Ihse Bursie wrote:

On 2017-03-02 12:19, Erik Joelsson wrote: I don't think I like this part. It's not uncommon to expect non zero return when tests are failing even in developer sessions. If we are to ever convert to using this new run-test for automated systems, which we really should, it must return non zero on failures. While this is probably true, that's not the only thing that needs adapting for having this run in automated systems. At this point in time, the goal was limited to providing a good developer experience. I hope too that we can expand this framework for using it in distributed test systems, but that needs much more work, and will likely be more intrusive.

I'm guessing you added this to avoid the extra failure printing from the build system. Well yes and no. In the old test framework, the behavior was not consistent whether to exit on failed tests result or not. I chose the stance that having successful make execution of the tests, even if some tests fails, warranted a successful make execution. In which cases were there inconsistency? JPRT certainly relies on make failing for everything it was running. That would at least cover the vast majority of cases actually in use. I would go as far as saying any other cases not currently conforming should be viewed as bugs.

For instance, if you set TREAT_EXIT_CODE_1_AS_0 then, as the variable says, exit code 1 will be treated as exit code 0. For the langtools test Makefile, you could either set EXIT=true to avoid (!) having it exit on failure. Also, langtools jtreg uses a EXIT_IF_FATAL check which compares

FATAL_JTREG_EXIT = 3. In one of our internal test suites, the default behavior is to use exit code 0 even on test failures, and our current make wrapper looks for the existence of a file to trigger a non-zero exit. So it's a bit messy.

This can of course be changed to the reverse so failed tests always lead to a make failure exit, or have the behavior selected by the user.

Surely this can be worked around differently? Yes, but not so unobtrusively. I wanted to have this change make a minimal impact on existing code. My suggestion is that we keep the current functionality, and work on getting a way to return non-zero results from test failures as part of a further development of this framework for distributed testing. I suggest that we change it to fail on failed tests instead of changing the behavior of the current test mechanism. I'm not sure I understand what you mean. My patch does not change any behavior of the current test mechanism. I will not introduce any such changes, not even if you wanted me to. :-) So that sounds like a false dichotomy.

I can change the new run-test system to fail on failed test. To keep it as readable as it is now, I would need to make a hack with the top-level FailureHandler. This sure can be done, but increases the risk of unintended consequences. But since you feel so strongly about this, I assume that's the way to go.

/Magnus

There will likely be other changes needed before automated systems can use this, but this is a very fundamental part of the API. If make doesn't fail, any wrapping tool/script/system is unable to know if the run was successful. All other build systems I know of that run tests do this (gradle, maven, ant etc).

/Erik /Magnus

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