Re: Testing Lua

[roberto@... (Roberto Ierusalimschy)]

> On 9/27/07, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo <lhf@tecgraf.puc-rio.br> wrote:
> > > I was also trying to locate the repository of the source code of Lua
> > > but I could not find it, not even in LuaForge. If it is available just
> > > I missed it, please point me to it.
> >
> > The repository is http://www.lua.org/ftp/ . There is no SVN repository
> > or anything like that.
> 
> this is strange.
> so how is Lua being developed?
> No version control at all or no public version control?
> I would be interested to read about this.

Lua is not "open developed". The development is done exclusively by the
Lua team, at PUC-Rio. So, we do not need a SVN repository. Currently,
we keep Lua with the good old RCS.


> Also why is the official test suit in such an obscure place and why is
> that not in the source package?

The test suit is quite heavy. Frequently, it raises errors due to
problems in libc (as many functions in Lua rely on a similar C function
to do its job). So, we prefer not to spread this test suit too much to
avoid noise. Nevertheless, Lua is well known for its robustness. We run
this heavy test suite is several different platforms; we run the whole
test suite under valgrind; there are several compilation flags to enhance
the testings. For instance, when we include the header file ltests.h,
that does the following (among other things):

- redefine the allocation function so that all blocks are controlled and
counted, and all realloc's are forced to move the memory block. We are
also able to force allocation errors (and we do a lot of tests with
this facility).

- redefine the buffer sizes to 27 (a small prime number);

- export to Lua several functions that reflects the C API to Lua.


-- Roberto