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Testing

This document describes how xolotl is tested before release, and our development strategy.

Release channels

xolotl is developed in the open, on Github

  • the master branch contains bleeding-edge releases, and should typically be functional. No breaking changes will be introduced in master without first being built in another branch.
  • If you're comfortable with git, you should probably pull from master, as that's the fastest way to get bugfixes and new features.
  • New features, or breaking changes, or architectural changes, will be first introduced in a different branch, and will be merged into master when sufficiently stable.
  • We also release MATLAB toolboxes as binary releases via Github releases. It is expected that most users (and inexperienced users) use this channel. Releases are published only if they pass a long string of tests on multiple operating systems. This is guaranteed to be stable.

Testing toolchain

kapalin

We use the kapalin testing framework to run a variety of tests both locally and on remote machines running different operating systems. Currently, we test on:

  • macOS
  • Windows 7
  • Debian
  • Ubuntu

VirtualBox

We use VirtualBox to virtualize operating systems so that kapalin can test the same toolbox binary on multiple operating systems.

github-release-cli

kapalin uses github-release-cli to automatically update binaries on Github if they pass all tests.