Re: [Pyvix-discuss] Anything I should know about pyvix before using it for serious work?

[David R. <dav...@ya...>]

--- Tim Wilson <Tim...@he...> wrote:
> The Vix interface appears sufficient for this.

Yes, theoretically.

> I've started writing the tests using the standard unittest module.

You didn't ask for my opinion about this, but I find the py.test
(http://codespeak.net/py/current/doc/test.html ) or nose
(http://somethingaboutorange.com/mrl/projects/nose/ ) a whole lot more
pleasant than plain stdlib unittest.  Unittest imposes too much
busywork on the programmer.  Between py.test and nose, my choice is
currently in favor of py.test by a narrow margin, but it's possible to
write one's test in such a way that they work under both frameworks.

> Simple things seem to work OK, but now I have started running
> multiple tests involving connecting and disconnecting to a VM,
> the python process is crashing...

I have every reason to suspect that the problems you've encountered are
due to bugs in VMWare's VIX code, not pyvix.  I'm very experienced with
the Python/C API, so I don't make many mistakes when writing wrapper
code.  pyvix also has a test suite that happens to demonstrate several
bugs (including segfaulting bugs) in VMWare's VIX impelementation--not
in pyvix.

I've already been down this frustrating path with VMWare with regard to
*one* of the bugs in their VIX implementation
(http://www.vmware.com/community/message.jspa?messageID=427234#427234
), and although they admitted that the problem is theirs, they haven't
actually fixed it yet, at least not in a publicly released build.

So, all VIX client code of anything more than trivial complexity is
dead in the water until VMWare, Inc. fixes the bugs in their VIX
implementation.  I've done what I can do to encourage them, and now I'm
helpless to further improve the situation.  The situation frustrates me immensely.


 
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