RFC: detecting wine drivers in the audio tests

[Robert Reif]

Maarten Lankhorst wrote:
> Hello Robert,
>
> 2008/4/29 Robert Reif <reif at earthlink.net>:
>   
>> The returned result of some audio functions on windows may be inconsistent
>> because a driver may actually supply the returned value.
>>
>>  This presents a problem for the wine regression tests because a buggy
>> driver may return an unexpected result which causes the test to fail.  One
>> way around this is to accept known failures as OK but that reduces the
>> usefulness of the test for wine because it may allow wine bugs to slip in.
>> I'm proposing the we determine if we are running on wine by defining a wine
>> manufactures id and checking for that id in the test.  If a wine driver is
>> found, don't accept a failure as OK.  The returned result should be well
>> defined and any failure is unacceptable.  However, if the driver is not a
>> wine driver and there are known buggy windows drivers that return specific
>> errors, we can check for that and not fail the test.  This should be easier
>> than maintaining a database of known broken drivers and black listing them.
>>
>>  I am concerned that requiring 100% wine regression test success on windows
>> is not practical when there are broken windows drivers out there.  Accepting
>> the failures as success is not good for wine because it may allow buggy wine
>> drivers to also pass.  I think we should hold wine audio drivers to higher
>> standards than the typical audio card manufacture.
>>
>>  I am suppling a minimal patch to the alsa driver and a single wave test to
>> illustrate this concept.  I hope this allows valid tests to remain in spite
>> of buggy windows drivers.
>>     
> I don't know, the general idea is that whatever windows lets you do is
> fine for wine, so I'm not 100% sure that testing for this is a good
> idea, because it means in border cases windows programs can't rely on
> those to return a correct or incorrect value either.
>
>   
The point is to not throw out a valid test because on in a million PCs 
has a buggy sound driver. I doubt that any programs would rely on a bug 
being present to work properly.  Particularly ignoring a specific 
failure code.
> By the way you also used a C++ style comment, wine doesn't allow that.
>
>   
This is just an RFC.  The example code is not ready for acceptance.  
Doing this right will require careful auditing of the test and I want to 
make sure this is reasonable before proceeding
> Cheers,
> Maarten
>
>
>
>