Some people have been checking out the new test client described in the previous post. So far, most of the questions I have received concern the format of the fate-test-cache.bz2 file downloaded from the FATE server. I admire that people are taking an interest in file format particulars — as you know, I encourage that. It’s nothing too special, though. I simply have a Python script called update-test-cache.py that queries FATE’s test_spec table into an array of dictionary data structures. Then it serializes/marshals/flattens the data using Python’s built-in pickle module. It’s trivial to de-pickle on the client-side. Of course, Python’s bzip2 module helps with size concerns.

What’s the pickle format? Darned if I know, but it works famously, so I don’t really care about reinventing that wheel. Especially when the code for decompressing and deserializing boils down to these 3 lines of Python:

Also, about that rsync command I mentioned in the last post:

rsync -aL rsync://rsync.mplayerhq.hu:/samples/fate-suite/ samples

Does that actually work for anyone? Occasionally, it works for me. Most of the time, it tells me:

rsync: failed to connect to rsync.mplayerhq.hu: Can't assign requested address (49)
rsync error: error in socket IO (code 10) at /SourceCache/rsync/rsync-30/rsync/clientserver.c(94)

which, according to my searches, is a fairly generic network error (at least the bit about assigning the requested address). Since I am usually populating the sample repository manually anyway, this hasn’t been a big problem. But I am trying to be more diligent about making sure the rsync repository is up to date since I expect more people will be using it.

Anyway, FATE growth plods on with 2 new tests tonight: nsv-demux and real-14_4 (weird, I just realized that the db assigned that one ID 144 completely by coincidence).