[Testing] [sugar] Automated testing, OLPC, code+screencasts.

[Titus Brown]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 11:22:48PM -0400, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:
-> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
-> Hash: SHA1
-> 
-> Titus Brown wrote:
-> | Over the next few months, hopefully aided by Zach Riggle and Grig
-> | Gheorghiu through the GSoC, I hope we can implement some sort of GUI
-> | testing framework, continuous build system, and basic fixtures for some
-> | internal functional tests.  After that I might be in a better position
-> | to address your specific points.
-> 
-> I look forward to the results.
-> 
-> Several of the OLPC engineers are also Haskell aficionados, and were
-> recently lamenting the lack of anything resembling QuickCheck for Python.
-> ~ Perhaps you will show us a solution.

This?   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickCheck

Very interesting!  I'm actually working on a Disney Animation intern
proposal that is very germane, although of course the lack of explicit
typing is going to be a problem.

-> ~From my observations, I have concluded that most of the recent bugs that
-> have caused irritation at OLPC have the following property. Two computers,
-> interacting over the network, pass through a series of states.  Each
-> computer's series of states does not imply an error.  However, the two
-> computers' histories are inconsistent, and taken together imply that there
-> has been an error somewhere.  The error usually has the form of
-> information that has failed to transfer completely.  For example, under
-> certain network conditions, I have seen invitations sporadically fail to
-> arrive.  No one knows why.
-> 
-> I hope you and your students will be able to construct a system that is
-> appropriate for these sorts of bugs.

That's definitely the medium-term goal.  Err, one question -- do you
think this is a software problem, or a hardware problem?  i.e. will we
need Genuine XO Hardware (tm) to reproduce?

cheers,
--titus