Last night, one of our grad students (Matt -- he was at the last meeting) made a suggestion regarding bug testing.
The problem: We know that before we submit a bug, we should install and compile the latest version in a stable environment, etc., and test there. But, Amber is large and everyone is always stressed, particularly so after fighting weird resutls for an hour or two only to find it really wasn't your input file. So, we don't necessarily report every bug because we simply might not have time in the moment to do the proper testing to make a good report. In our group, we often get around bugs by keeping old versions of Amber and just switching to one that works for whatever it is we want to do. Right now, we have a possible bug in ptraj with files over 4 GB, but as you might imagine, the testing alone for a 4 GB file is very time consuming, and not a priority for a grad student who can just switch to a different Amber and get the job done.
A possible solution: Put a server somewhere that has the very latest, up to date Amber installed on it. Make it only available to developers, and maybe update the install daily or weekly, complete with tests. Then, we have a known-working, latest version system where we can try out a minimal system that we think shows a bug. Another advantage to this is that other developers can easily log in and check out the input, output, etc., when there is a bug. Depending on how rhizome-like the Amber code has become, it might also be useful for quickly finding issues generated by commits from different developers.
Of course, this won't fix all problems, but it might make it easier to make better tests and reports.
This is something else that can be discussed at the meeting, I guess, if there is interest.
:-) L
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Received on Sat Oct 16 2010 - 09:00:02 PDT
