bug 9986

[Damjan Jovanovic]

On 10/26/07, Reece Dunn <msclrhd at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 25/10/2007, Juan Lang <juan.lang at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Tests would also be useful here as well, so that there is not a regression.
> >
> > That's good general advice, but hard to implement without a serial
> > device to test against, which our test systems won't have.
>
> You could always skip the tests when a serial connection is not
> present. That way, you get coverage on systems that do have them. It
> should be possible to configure Virtual Machines that have serial
> ports suitable for use in these tests.
>
> If there are other factors that make this complicated to test (such as
> getting repeatable results from the serial devices on machines that
> have serial ports configured) then it is not worth the effort to
> create tests for this case.
>
> Are there any existing tests for the serial port code? If there are,
> that would suggest that this is possible.

If we have serial port tests, then there aren't nearly enough. Check
on bugzilla, virtually every serial port patch introduces at least 1
new regression, and these regressions generally don't get fixed,
resulting in constantly deteriorating serial port support.

Testing serial port hardware is very difficult because you need the
tests to work on Windows, and you need everybody to have the hardware.
You can emulate a serial port, but that requires kernel-mode drivers
in at least Windows, and emulating hardware that plugs into the
emulated port isn't much easier.

Out of interest, Java and Mono both have serial port classes, do they
do any serial port regression testing?

> - Reece

Damjan