Re: email-based regression search server

[Joe Buck <jbuck at synopsys dot com>]

On Wed, Feb 05, 2003 at 02:43:49PM -0500, Phil Edwards wrote:
> It can now also look for the opposite situation:  the input code was broken,
> but now compiles.  (I don't know of an example.)

One reason someone might want that is if they know that someone fixed
a failure on one branch, and they want to figure out what the fix was,
for the purpose of porting the fix to another branch.

> Input test code that worked, then broke, then worked, then broke, etc, will
> naturally drive the hunter nuts.  Like you'd expect with a binary search.

If the binary search always halves the range, it would seem that it will
still converge to something in log(N) steps.  Is there something I'm
missing?

That is, the search is designed for searching a series of points that
look like this:

P P P P P P F F F F
            ^--------first failure.

If instead you have

P P F F P P P P F F F F

then you know that you will find an F that is immediately preceded by
a P, but you don't know which one you'll get.

Right?