[Insight-developers] Buildflags for producing flaky executables

[Hans Johnson]

Brad,

The itkSystemInformationTest that you added is VERY useful.  The only 
problem that I see is that it is buried in a non-intuitive place.  In 
addition, only the developers who read yesterdays message addressed to 
me would know that this information exists.

I think that this information should also be available on the main 
testing page.  For example, if you were to click on the buildname, then 
that would take you directly to this set of information.  I thought that 
this was what the cfg field of the dashboard was for (by the way, what 
is the current cfg information useful for?).

I had several problems when I first started using ITK because I did not 
know what compiler flags were being used for the testing.  It was very 
discouraging to see an IRIX64 machine with almost all green, and a 
checkout of the same version would not even compile.  In fact, I did not 
know how to figure that out until your e-mail yesterday.

If this information were in an obvious place from the main testing page, 
then new developers using the CVS version of ITK could goto the 
dashboard, find a similar machine to their own with all green marks, and 
have some confidence that those compiler flags would work (or even more 
important if they will fail).

I have almost finished working the kinks out of submitting 8 nightly 
builds.  These will be for 4 different compilers (icc, gcc2, gcc3, 
MipsPro) in 2 different modes (DEBUG~"-g -Wall", FAST~"-O3 
-takeforevertocompile -useoptimizedmathlibs").  I have found that most 
testing is done in DEBUG mode with the assumption that compiler 
optimizations will not change the results.  This is usually true, and 
can easily be made true (by adding parenthesis or explicitly reordering 
the code) once the developer determines where these differences occur.

Again, thank you for adding this!

Thanks,
Hans


> I've just added an "itkSystemInformationTest" to itkCommonTests.  It
> displays the CMakeCache.txt file from the build.  This will give all the
> information needed to determine the platform and compiler flags used for a
> particular dashboard build.
> 
> -Brad
> 
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-- 
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Hans J. Johnson                              W294 GH
hans-johnson@uiowa.edu                       Dept. of Psychiatry
http://www.psychiatry.uiowa.edu/~hjohnson    The University of Iowa
(319) 353-8587                               Iowa City, IA 52242
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