By the way of trying to figure out how to make tests building faster? (I will post about it later), I have learned some interesting practices regarding Boost testing in general. Especially, Robert Ramey shared his best practices, worth to look at really. New release of Boost will be released next week, so I’m testing Boost.Geometry library and it is a good opportunity to apply some of Robert’s rules.

I’m testing against “known good” components – the next release branch.

How to run tests of current development line of a library (a Boost library, e.g. Boost.Geometry) against Boost release branch? Assuming all the library development happens in Boost trunk, let’s say in ${DEV}/boost/_svn/trunk where ${DEV} is your base workshop location, do this:

• Checkout Boost release branch

  mkdir -p ${DEV}/boost/_svn/branches/release
  cd ${DEV}/boost/_svn/branches/release
  svn co https://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/branches/release/ .
  

• Stay in ${DEV}/boost/_svn/branches/release
• Build and install Boost.Build v2 from the release branch:

  cd tools/build/v2
  # On Windows, run bootstrap.bat
  ./bootstrap.sh
  # On Windows, I use C:\usr as prefix for my Boost installation
  ./b2 --prefix=/usr/local install
  # Note, this command will also install b2 utility in ${prefix}/bin
  

• Switch Boost.Geometry directories to trunk:

  svn switch https://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/trunk/boost/geometry boost/geometry
  svn switch https://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/trunk/libs/geometry libs/geometry
  

• Run tests and generate full log in file:

  export BGLOG=boost-geometry-test.log
  date > $BGLOG & b2 >> $BGLOG 2<&1 & date >> $BGLOG
  
  # On Windows, I run this with logging this way:
  set BGLOG=%CD%\boost-geometry-test.log
  dateu.exe > %BGLOG% & b2 >> %BGLOG% 2<&1 & dateu.exe >> %BGLOG%
  

  Note, the dateu.exe is renamed Unix utility date.exe installed from GnuWin32 packages. I just like it.

Inspect the log file for test failures, for example by quick check of number of passed tests:

$ grep "\*passed\*" boost-geometry-test.log | wc -l
111

That’s it.

Try this out – it will help a lot.