Test suite results are unwieldy

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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
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