Re: unit tests and related matters

On 07/21/2013 03:11 AM, Ross Boylan wrote:
> On Saturday, July 20, 2013 03:14:25 PM Nicos Angelopoulos wrote:
>> Dear Ross,
>>
>> You will be better off installing a newer version.
> Is there any easy way to tell how the versions differ?  I looked around the web
> site and source; all I found was http://www.swi-
> prolog.org/git/pl.git/tree/HEAD:/ReleaseNotes which has release notes for
> 5.10.  The mail archive turned up some relase announcements, which do show
> changelogs, so they must be somewhere.  Something higher level would be good;
> the release notes in the emails seem to cover differences from the immediately
> preceding release only.

You get all of it using a request like this (be patient; takes long):

	http://www.swi-prolog.org/ChangeLog?branch=stable&from=5.10.4&to=6.4.0

It won't make you very happy though. There is three years of development
between these two versions. Debian was held back for a long time due to
lack of an active maintainer and and portability problems with some of
Debian's targets. This was resolved some time ago thanks to Eugeniy
Meshcheryakov.  Unfortunately, this was too late for Debian 7.0, so I
fear that Debian users must compile from source or wait another couple
of years.

I fear that the Ubuntu PPA's don't work, but you might check these
out.  See http://www.swi-prolog.org/build/Debian.txt

> Did you mean better off in general, or specifically for testing?  I see from
> Michael's post (thanks) that  some tools require a newer version of SWI
> prolog.

There are not that many changes to plunit. From my head, the only change
is that assertion/1 is intercepted by PlUnit to produce coherent
messages and testing results. There might be some changes to keep
up-to-date with the core of SWI-Prolog. PlUnit uses some undocumented
low-level interfaces.

>> There is an SWI PPA and dependencies for building from sources.
> I think you're saying to get the source package and then build it on Debian,
> right?  I know Ubuntu is a Debian derivative, but I'm not sure how reliable it
> is to use on Debian.
>>
>> Have you seen:
>>	http://www.swi-prolog.org/build/Debian.html
> No I hadn't.  It's a little odd the Debian version is so old, since Wheezy was
> just released.  There is a newer version in unstable, 6.2.6.

That might work too. Compiling from source should be fairly easy. the
SWI-Prolog server that serves www.swi-prolog.org runs on Debian (still
6.0).

	Cheers --- Jan