Xzajo's Weblog

Binary Test Distribution For NetBeans IDE

I'm finishing binary test distribution for NetBeans IDE. The test distribution won't be available for NetBeans 5.5 because it's too late to do it. The distribution will be available for NetBeans 6.0 build on download page, I hope. Quality Engineering team got idea to distribute NetBeans with its test binaries few years ago. We decided after a while to spend time to remove cvs dependencies on running tests and create files layout for test binaries.

To build test distribution is very simple now. You only need to checkout cvs files for NetBeans dev build, build ide and test distribution:

cvs co standard_nowww
cd nbbuild
ant
ant build-test-dist -Dtest.fail.on.error=false

Ant needs more memory for building tests than is default value. So increase it by overring ANT_OPTS environment variable.

ANT_OPTS=-Xmx512m

The property test.fail.on.error ignore compilation failures because few tests are still uncompilable. It is curious that some test are uncompilable. Why developer write tests if the test is uncompilable after a while. IMHO all the tests will have to be run daily if continuos integration is dream. I hope it will be solved as soon as possible.

The tests are built into nbbuild/build/testdist folder and packed to nbbuild/build/testdist.zip file. In the root folder of test distribution is short README.txt file. It contains description how to run tests. For example when you want to run all test(qa-functional and unit), you need only run ant :

ant all -Dnetbeans.dest.dir="${netbeans.home}"

The netbeans.dest.dir property contains directory with NetBeans installation. Te result of testrun is formated to html files. The html files are available in:

• unit/results - for unit tests
• qa-functional/results - for qa-functional tests

More details about binary test distribution are here.

Posted by xzajo ( Sep 01 2006, 02:32:17 PM CEST ) Permalink Comments [4]