Re: Regression Testing

[Sven Luther]

On Mon, Sep 05, 2005 at 02:47:08AM +0200, Håkon Løvdal wrote:
> On 9/2/05, Sven Luther <address@hidden> wrote:
> > On Fri, Sep 02, 2005 at 02:55:03PM +0200, address@hidden wrote:
> > >
> > > Dear fellow developers,
> > >
> > > I'd really like to get the regression testing thing sorted out.
> > > Without it we always have to test basic functionality before
> > > each release manually. This is error-prone and time-consuming, both of
> > > which I am very fond of.
> > > Let's discuss which system to use and then get it up and running.
> > 
> > you wnt to regression test the library, or the parted frontend too ?
> > 
> > We could have a set of special library test programs, which we would run on 
> > a
> > set of disk images of each different partition table formats. Not sure how 
> > we
> > can handle huge disk images though, so i think we would not be able to test
> > the kind of breakage involved with big disks, unless we use files-with-holes
> > or whatever those are called.
> 
> Swiss-cheese-like files?
> 
> On the more serious side, let me share my thoughts on regression testing.
> 
> A few years ago I wrote the program printpar which can print the partition
> table in various ways. I have not done anything with printpar since then
> but one of the things I really wanted (and still want) was regression
> testing, so I spent some time thinking about that even though I did not
> implement it.
> 
> I advocate creating a specific test file format containing (only)
> the relevant sectors from the disk along with some corresponding
> meta-data. The meta-data would be located at the very beginning,
> containing a mapping table between offsets on the real disk and the
> corresponding offset within the test file. Following the meta-data the
> relevant sectors from the disk are just added (in any order as long as
> the mapping table is correct).

This could pave the way to a partition table backup and restoration options
too, right ? 

Friendly,

Sven Luther