Unclean CTest results on master branch

[jmgate]

Before attempting to test #205, I configured, built, and ran ctest against TriBITS' master branch, and saw the test failures shown here. It seems likely that there is simply something wrong with my setup, though I followed the instructions in README.rst. Any advice would be appreciated. Many thanks.

[bartlettroscoe]

@jmgate, yea, I saw a bunch of these failures myself when trying to run the full TriBITS test suite using Python 3.5.2 as part of #201. I just got the gitdist tests (called 'TriBITS_gitdist_UnitTests') working with Python 3.5.2. Therefore, you can just run that one test with ctest -VV -R TriBITS_gitidst_UnitTests and test gitdist. If it is critical to get the fully TriBITS test suite to run with Python 3.5.2, I can put some time into that.

[jmgate]

It's not critical for me—I was just hoping to test out #205 to save you the time in testing it. I'll try just running the gitdist_UnitTests and see how that goes.

[bartlettroscoe]

@jmgate, I will go ahead and pull the PR #205 branch and test it along with the one for #203 (hopefully tomorrow).

[bartlettroscoe]

@jmgate,

FYI: if you push your branch to this GitHub repo instead of your fork, then it will be automatically tested by Travis CI and posted to CDash. That tests with CMake 2.8.11 and Python 2.7.6.

I need to figure out how to get Travis CI to test with other versions of Python as well.

[jmgate]

Hey @bartlettroscoe, I just found out the other day they the end of life for Python 2 is scheduled for 12/31/2019, so that gives you a need-by date (still ~2 years away) for switching over the rest of TriBITS's testing.

[bartlettroscoe]

I just found out the other day they the end of life for Python 2 is scheduled for 12/31/2019, so that gives you a need-by date (still ~2 years away) for switching over the rest of TriBITS's testing.

That is interesting. But given that the default system-installed Python is 2.6.6 on RHEL6 and 2.7 on RHEL7, I think we will need to be supporting Python 2.x for many years to come even if the Python community is not supporting Python 2.x anymore. I think that is the reality of things at SNL. It will likely be 4+ years before they even retire most of the RHEL6 machines and 10+ years before they retire RHEL7 machines at SNL.

[jmgate]

Oh dear. And here I got all excited…

[bartlettroscoe]

Given this is a Python 3 issue, I am going to close. We need to set up a Python 3 Travis CI build if we have any hope of maintaining Python 3 support in TriBITS (or Trilinos for that matter).

@jmgate, someone should open a new issue to add Python 3 testing to the Travis CI TriBITS testing. Otherwise, closing this.