[PATCH] D13101: Add initial LNT developer guide

[Chris Matthews via llvm-commits]

Much needed. Looks good.  Thanks Kristof!


> On Sep 23, 2015, at 8:33 AM, Kristof Beyls <kristof.beyls at arm.com> wrote:
> 
> kristof.beyls created this revision.
> kristof.beyls added reviewers: cmatthews, ddunbar.
> kristof.beyls added a subscriber: llvm-commits.
> 
> After not having worked on LNT for a while, it took me a little while to figure out again how to run the LNT regression tests.
> This made me think that we should have an LNT developer guide, to make it easier to get started on developing LNT.
> This patch is an attempt at a very initial set of guidelines for doing LNT development.
> 
> http://reviews.llvm.org/D13101
> 
> Files:
>  docs/contents.rst
>  docs/developer_guide.rst
> 
> Index: docs/developer_guide.rst
> ===================================================================
> --- /dev/null
> +++ docs/developer_guide.rst
> @@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
> +.. _developer_guide:
> +
> +Developer Guide
> +===============
> +
> +This developer guide aims to get you started with developing LNT. At the
> +moment, a lot of detailed info is missing, but hopefully this will get you
> +started.
> +
> +Installation
> +------------
> +
> +See _quickstart for setting up an installation. Use the "develop" option when
> +running ~/lnt/setup.py.
> +
> +Running LNT's Regression Tests
> +------------------------------
> +
> +LNT has a growing body of regression tests that makes it easier to improve LNT
> +without accidentally breaking existing functionality. Just like when developing
> +most other LLVM sub-projects, you should consider adding regression tests for
> +every feature you add or every bug you fix. The regression tests must pass at
> +all times, therefore you should run the regression tests as part of your
> +development work-flow, just like you do when developing on other LLVM
> +sub-projects.
> +
> +The LNT regression tests make use of lit and other tools like FileCheck. At
> +the moment, probably the easiest way to get them installed is to compile LLVM
> +and use the binaries that are generated there. Assuming you've build LLVM
> +into $LLVMBUILD, you can run the regression tests using the following command::
> +
> +     PATH=$LLVMBUILD/bin:$PATH llvm-lit -sv ./tests
> +
> +If you don't like temporary files being created in your LNT source directory,
> +you can run the tests in a different directory too::
> +
> +     mkdir ../run_lnt_tests
> +     cd ../run_lnt_tests
> +     PATH=$LLVMBUILD/bin:$PATH llvm-lit -sv ../lnt/tests
> +
> +For simple changes, adding a regression test and making sure all regression
> +tests pass, is often a good enough testing approach. For some changes, the
> +existing regression tests aren't good enough at the moment, and manual testing
> +will be needed. For any changes that touch on the LNT database design, you'll
> +need to run tests on at least sqlite and postgress database engines.  By
> +default, LNT uses sqlite, and most of the regression tests still use a
> +temporary sqlite database to run tests against. Therefore, at the moment,
> +you'll probably need to do some manual testing on a setup with a postgress
> +database if you touch database functionality.
> Index: docs/contents.rst
> ===================================================================
> --- docs/contents.rst
> +++ docs/contents.rst
> @@ -16,6 +16,8 @@
> 
>    changes
> 
> +   developer_guide
> +
>    todo
> 
> Indices and tables
> 
> 
> <D13101.35507.patch>