[Olsr-dev] -Werror. WAS: Android build & regex

[Hans of Guardian]

On Oct 15, 2012, at 11:03 AM, Henning Rogge wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 4:57 PM, Hans of Guardian
> <(spam-protected)> wrote:
>>> I propose to enable the -Werror flag on DEBUG builds.
>>> 
>>> Our default build is with debug and most people (like mdns) build that way.
>>> Also, the debug builds (on my system) pass with -Werror while the non-debug builds do not.
>> 
>> As long as -Werror is not enabled when running "make", I can live with it being in a DEBUG mode, though I'll probably remove it frequently.
>> 
>> But I think there is too much reliance on compiler warnings.  I think olsrd would be better if that energy was spent on writing automated tests.
> 
> I have written quite a few automatic tests for the basic framework for
> OLSRv2, but writing tests for the routing code itself is very
> difficult, even in the modularized new framework. In the current code
> everything is connected to everything else... I don't know if I could
> write tests for this.

Runtime testing of routing would be very valuable, but yes, obviously not easy.

For the kinds of stuff that compiler warnings will provide us, we can definitely write tests.  Things like proper number formats and conversions, edge cases when using certain functions, buffer overflows and other exploits, etc.  

These tests can be bits of C code pretending to be the internals of olsrd with lots of fake data related to routing in order to get to the conditions needed for the test.

.hc