Tests and RNG

[Derek Atkins]

Unfortunately there's just no good way to do this..  There's no
way to record the initial random seed after-the-fact, because
it's actually initialized in libqof (in guid.c, in fact).  Also,
there's just not a good infrastructure to set an initial random
seed for the tests during the standard "make check" sequence.

Many tests do have a commented-out srand(1) to re-inialize the RNG
in order to make a deterministic test.  However, /most/ of the
time the bugs we find through the RNG are bugs in the test, not
bugs in the code being tested.

-derek

"cxl000 at hotmail.com" <cxl000 at hotmail.com> writes:

> I have seen mentioned a number of times were the inital seed for the RNG
> can effect the outcome of the test because under some conditions it may
> trigger a bug and that the current test infrastructure does not help in
> being able to reproduce these problems.
>
> I would like to suggest that test be change to take an optional seed and
> to report the seed being used.
> The default behavior is not changed allowing a wide range of random
> conditions to be tested but when a test does fail the seed used can be
> found in the logs and provided to allow reporoducing the problem.
>
> Regards,
> Chris Leach

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available