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Name: Julian Fitzell

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9 Feb 2004 (updated 9 Feb 2004)  »

The votes are in. As I suspected, the community is pretty divided on the issue of putting tests back into the update stream.

I had a journal entry talking about it more, but someone asked me to just let this issue die. And I have to say I'm tired of the argument, so I think I will.

I also had a journal entry in reply to some of Doug's comments in his latest entry, but when I submitted my second entry it overwrote that one!

So... you get no content. I think the point has been made that there is significant resistance to the idea of putting the tests back in the update stream. I leave it at that.

3 Feb 2004  »

Argument against tests in the update stream

This thread has gone on long enough on the mailing list. Perhaps neither side of the debate has done a particularly good job of explaining their argument.

As my last attempt to correct the situation, let me present a list of reasons why I think the update stream is a poor vehicle for the base image tests. Please remember that the code in the update stream no longer directly represents the code that appears in the full image available for download. We are not talking about whether the tests should be available in the image that you download on the squeak web page - they should be. We are talking only about whether the tests should be managed by the update stream.

So here follows a list (in random order) of reasons I think the update stream is a poor solution:

  1. Forces all users to download a 300k update (into every image they need to update) even if they do not want the tests (and presumably the tests code will be getting larger)
  2. If we follow the suggestion of removing the tests from the update stream for release and putting them back in again for alpha, we force users to *repeatedly* download these large updates
  3. After the tests have been rewritten and rearranged a bunch of times, a user updating from a 3.6 image, say, to a 3.9 image still has to download the original 300k update even though much of it will be overwritten in later updates. This is even worse if we believe we will remove the tests later - you have to download them just to remove them again in a later update.
  4. Updates are put in the stream only every week or two - tests want to be updated more frequently, and could be updated as frequently as we like in an external package.
  5. If tests are in the update stream, one can't get the new tests without pulling in all the changes with it. Perhaps someone wants to pull the tests into a deployment image (that they don't want to move to alpha) to see which particular problems that image suffers from.
  6. The update stream, being imperative, makes it much harder to have local changes to tests while you are working: loading an update could overwrite your local changes. This is made worse by the amount of time it takes for changes to make it into the stream: you end up having to keep a lot of changes locally until they get accepted; it's easy in this state to lose track of what has been accepted, which fixes are in which saved image, and which updates might overwrite changes in a particular image.

The update stream does one thing very well and that is pushing out "patches" to people running images that need updating. It does, in my opinion, a poor job of holding code that people are actively developing, which is why (I thought) we were moving away from it where possible. Putting a large, beautifully-separated package back into the update stream seems like a huge step in the wrong direction.

I firmly believe that we can develop a process that makes it as easy to load the tests from squeakmap as it is from the update stream. Surely we can just add a menu item right next to the one to load updates that updates the BaseImageTests package? There could even be a menu item that did them both at the same time. What's the difference from the user's point of view? Nothing except increased control.

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