[pygame] Tests crashing Automatic Build page + Compiling PyGame on Windows

[Nicholas Dudfield <ndudfield@xxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings all.

Computer Died
=============

My computer recently decided it needed to go into early retirement and I 
have been forced to use my friends old Windows box when able. He has 
alot of assignments at the moment and I can only really use it while 
he's at school. My computer should be back in operation in a few days 
hopefully when a replacement cooling fan arrives.

As I am on Windows I need to get access to binaries of the pygame svn 
HEAD. This is normally no trouble as the automatic build page usually 
has them posted. Lately though, some surface lock tests are crashing the 
build script. The windows builds crashed a few revisions ago so I 
decided to compile from source.

Compiling Pygame
================

The instructions for building pygame on windows using MSYS involved 
downloading and compiling dependencies. It was not until afterwards that 
I found out that prebuilts were available. It would probably be helpful 
to link to them somewhere on the wiki. It was not until afterwards that 
I found out that prebuilts were available. I will do that myself once my 
computer is operational again. In fact there is a note on the wiki, 
"*note* We should have a download with everything included. As well as 
patches for each one that we need. "

Anyway, I went to the pains of downloading all the dependencies and 
compiling. The msys_build_deps.py script works very nicely, the only 
issue I had was that SMPEG wouldn't compile. I just got a copy of the 
config and dll from the page with the prebuilts.

This was the error message from the script:

$ msys_build_deps.py SMPEG

=== Starting build ===
aclocal: configure.in: 133: macro `AM_PATH_SDL' not found in library
aclocal: configure.in: 219: macro `AM_PATH_GTK' not found in library
'./autogen.sh' failed to run properly
Build aborted: The build for SMPEG failed with code 1

Failing Tests
=============

I built revision 1376 and running run_tests.py here crashes before 
completion of all the tests. I traced it to surflock_test.py.
I renamed it temporarily so it wouldn't be picked up by run_tests.py and 
then the suite ran to completion, showing failures in transform_test.py. 
Bizarrely, I ran that test discretely and it passed.

I think surflock_test.py crashed the automated builds for 
http://thorbrian.com/pygame/builds.php

I saw that builds for revision 1376 were recently posted to the list 
with a note saying it passed all unit tests. I downloaded it, removed my 
existing pygame install, deleting the whole pygame folder, and installed 
it. Same surflock_test.py crash, same transform_test.py failures and errors.

The surflock_test.py crash actually stalls the test suite and it reports 
nothing; no F, E or OK.

D:\Nick\PyGame\trunk>run_tests.py
loading base_test
loading blit_test
loading color_test
loading display_test
loading font_test
loading image_test
loading image__save_gl_surface_test
loading key_test
loading mask_test
loading mixer_test
loading movie_test
loading pixelarray_test
loading rect_test
loading sndarray_test
loading sprite_test
loading surface_test
loading surfarray_test
loading surflock_test
loading transform_test
................................................................................
................................................................................
................................................................................
..................

We need to make the build page + test runner more resistant to tests 
that will possibly crash everything.

Cheers,

Akalias.

ps. Sorry in anticipation of being late in replying to replies.