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Entry  27 Nov 2008, Konstantin Olchanski, Bug Fix, Fix ss_file_size() on 32-bit Linux 
    Reply  01 Dec 2008, Stefan Ritt, Bug Fix, Fix ss_file_size() on 32-bit Linux 
    Reply  02 Dec 2008, Stefan Ritt, Bug Fix, Fix ss_file_size() on 32-bit Linux 
       Reply  02 Dec 2008, Konstantin Olchanski, Bug Fix, Fix ss_file_size() on 32-bit Linux 
          Reply  02 Dec 2008, Stefan Ritt, Bug Fix, Fix ss_file_size() on 32-bit Linux 
Message ID: 540     Entry time: 02 Dec 2008     In reply to: 539
Author: Stefan Ritt 
Topic: Bug Fix 
Subject: Fix ss_file_size() on 32-bit Linux 

K.O. wrote:
This does not work (observe the typoe in the #ifdef).


Sorry for that, I fixed and committed it.


K.O. wrote:
But you cannot know this because you already deleted the test program I wrote and committed to svn exactly to detect and prevent this kind of breakage (+ plus to give the Solaris, BSD and other wierdo users some way to check that ss_file_size() works on their systems)..


Well, you figured it out even without the test program in the distribution! But I'm sure no other user would have known how to use your test program to diagnose this problem. So 99% of the users would scratch their head about this undocumented program and get confused. I believe we two are responsible that the midas kernel functions work correctly and the average user should not have to bother with it. I agree that it's handy for you to have this little test program in the distribution, so you can run it everywhere you install midas. But for me it would be handy to have files with, let's say, nature's constants, particle decay life times, list of ASCII codes, and so on. But it would clutter up the distribution and the disadvantage of annoying users would be bigger than my personal benefit, so I don't do it.

If you absolutely want to keep a certain test functionality, you can add it into a "central" test program, write some help and documentation for it, educate users how to use it and how to report any errors back to you. Maybe some printout like "all tests ok" and some specific comment if a test fails would be helpful for the normal user. This test program could then also contain other tests like C structure alignment (which sometimes is a problem), some mutex tests and whatever we collected along the road. An alternative would be to add this into a "test" command inside odbedit.
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