Test suite results are unwieldy

They consume disk space, they consume time when downloading and when copying to a remote machine. People view them as "unimportant" (when compared to source files), and are generally annoyed. What can we do about this?

Some suggestions include:

• Do nothing; explain to people that test suite results are very important to ensure correctness, tell them to suffer through transmit times and ask for larger quota
  • That's not a solution.
• Don't copy test suite results to remote machines by default; only copy them when requested
  • This makes it more difficult to run the test suite, which should (ideally) be run every time a new executable has been created for a production run.
• tar/gzip test suite results to save disk space, possibly also storing them this way in the SVN repository
  • This doesn't save transmit time (since rsync already compresses), and (if used in the repository) doesn't allow delta compression
• Combine test suite results from different source trees into a single directory (with soft links or hard links or similarly)
  • This would be an extra step that runs after all files are there, already consuming disk space.
• Use HDF5 instead of ASCII
  • Binary files are not well handled by SVN.
• Combine several ASCII files into one (fewer files are handled more efficiently), e.g. designing a simple ASCII container format for test cases, or even using this format in CarpetIOASCII
  • Wouldn't save disk space.
• Use a different ASCII format that doesn't store 13 columns for 1 data field
  • Maybe we could use the ygraph format?
• BCM: Separate the test suite results (data) from the source tree.
  • This allows a unified management of the data: when to check it out, when to sync it to a remote machine, etc.
  • The user could choose not to checkout the data if she has a laptop with very little hard drive space left, for example.
  • The test suite data could be laid out similarly to the source tree: ./Cactus/arrangements/ARRANGEMENTNAME/THORNNAME ==> ./Cactus/testsuites/ARRANGEMENTNAME/THORNNAME
  • One problem with that is that there is no clear connection between a version of the source and a version of a testsuite anymore.
• Don't change the layout of a usual checkout, but let simfactory not only omit .svn directories, but let it also compress the testsuites to single compressed files.
  • This would not significantly reduce the time for syncing - in fact it might add a bit because it would need to compress them locally in the first place.
  • It would, on the remote side, be no problem for version control, since there is none anyway (.svn is not copied)
  • It should reduce IO-stress on machines like kraken/ranger where the number of files is the problem, not so much their size.
  • Running the testsuites remotely would still work (since Cactus now supports that).