[vtk-developers] vtkMath::Dot2D

[Biddiscombe, John A.]

David

> Is there any way to tell if my change broke anything on the dashboard.
> In an ideal world, if the dashboard was completely green, I would just
> watch the continuous builds (which there seems to be only one of??)
> and see if they turn red. In the real world, if most of the builds
> have tests failing - how would I be alerted that my change caused more
> failures?

The best way is through experience. After a few years of checking the dashboard every day, and making small commits and running your own tests, you have a pretty good idea of what your changes are likely to break. When you look at the dashboard, you'll see a bunch of fails and you'll ask yourself. Are they my fault or someone else's?
It's sometimes hard to know, but if you practice checking the dashboard every day, even when you are not committing things, and looking at the daily cvs logs on the dashboard, you'll see what other people are working on - and this will give you an idea of what other people are breaking too. When you see certain tests failing every day, and someone committing things related to those tests/classes you'll know they're probably not your fault. 

For best results, run tests on your machine on a clean cvs head checkout, run them as well with your modified version, compare and contrast. Then be prepared for a world of pain when you commit stuff and dozens of machines with platforms you are not familiar with start failing on trivial nonsense - mostly caused by old compilers (that only one person called Bill uses).

Common sense helps too. When making changes to vtkMath, you can be fairly certain that many many classes are affected, since it's used all over the place. When changing vtkMyVerySpecificCustomPolyDataToTableFilter, you know nobody cares much about it and it will affect only itself and its own test.

You will receive plenty of unhelpful emails by someone called CDash that tell you it's all your fault, he still sends me emails every day even though I haven't committed anything for weeks. Perhaps he's waiting for a Christmas card from me.

JB