CodeSOD: Testing Architectures

Marlyn's employer ships software for a wide variety of CPU architectures. And depending on which branch of the product you were digging into, you might have code that builds for just i386, x86_64, PPC, and PPC64, while another branch might add s390, s390x, and aarch64.

As you might imagine, they have a huge automated test suite, meant to ensure that changes don't break functionality or compatibility. So it's a pity that their tests were failing.

The error messages implied that there were either missing or too many files, depending on the branch in question, but Marlyn could see that the correct build outputs were there, so nothing should be missing. It must be the test suite that had the error.

Marlyn dug into the Python script which drove their tests, and found the get_num_archs function, which theoretically would detect how many architectures this branch should output. Unfortunately, its implementation was straight out of XKCD.

def get_num_archs(self): return 7 # FIXME

At least they left a comment.

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