App::Prove::State Questions

[Nicholas Clark]

On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 08:34:29PM +0100, Andy Armstrong wrote:
> On 21 Aug 2008, at 20:17, Ovid wrote:

> > Am I likely to break anything?  I don't know if anyone is really  
> > using the state syntax.
> 
> 
> I don't /think/ so. The file format is undocumented so I don't think  
> people can be too surprised if it changes - and I'm not aware of any  
> 3rd party apps apart from your script to report on test execution times.

For the core, for harness, I was tempted to find a way to aggregate the
stored times of tests in the same directory (ie the test files that the
ruleset we generate says must run in series) so that I could work out the
expected run time of each directory of tests, and order directories in
slowest first.

But the file format wasn't documented, there wasn't an interface, and
it turns out that alphabetical order works quite well thank you very much
as ext/Compress/Zlib is early in the sorted list :-)

(its tests being a good source of slowness)


So whilst it would be "nice to have" to find an approximately optimal order
to run a more complete ruleset of tests in parallel, in practice I don't
think that the effort or complexity is worth it, at least not for the core.

Nicholas Clark