Meson tests are parallel

2018-08-12

meson , testing

Today i searched half of the day for a super strange bug in my library development project. I wanted to build this library as a TDD library to get the hang of working from the API caller side first. Therefore i always build my tests before i write the working code.

My library has business layer with interfaces to all sides so i basically don’t care which implementation i use and i can act dynamically when i want a different backend for example. My implementation for the database layer is a sqlite one and this specific module was failing all the day. The interesting part is: it was just failing in a specific test order of my library tests. I was super confused because i got a database is locked error when i created my table scheme in one of my tests. The same call from former tests succeeded so there has to be a problem with opening and closing of my database. I checked every call to sqlite_open and sqlite_close and checked the return code of these calls but it looked like everything is fine.

Sqlite allows multiple reader in different connections but only one writer. The statement which failed in my test suite was a

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS (...)

I think this gets always interpreted as a write even if the database already has that table. What me really bothered was the ordering removed this error and i thought i have a really terrible closing error in my library. But then i realized that maybe it has nothing todo with my library. I knowed that i can configure meson to use more processes for testing. I consulted the meson reference and saw this statement about unit tests:

To reduce test times, Meson will by default run multiple unit tests in parallel.

This was the culprint. Tests which use my database even when i don’t test specifically my database are run in parallel which means multiple writer. A reordering can help – but would be a fragile solution. Disabling parallelism for some unit tests was the solution after all. So keep that in mind, when you try TDD – know your buildsystem, tap runner and environment!