Comment 3 for bug 770428

On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 10:38 AM, Paul Everitt <email address hidden> wrote:

> (I made Nat and Robert.)
>
> That's a clever suggestion if the goal is to just measure
> repoze.postoffice and whether it is functioning. Though we wouldn't
> know what threshold to set it at. What constitutes "too long ago" for
> KARL?
>
>
I figure it would 2 or 3 times the period of the tracer email. So, if we're
sending a tracer email every 5 minutes, then 10 or 15 minutes is too long.

> If we're planning on doing an end-to-end test, meaning writing blog
> content into a KARL community, we're back to some of the issues in the
> LP ticket.

Well, we had been discussing creating a special handler inside of Karl that
would note the receipt of the tracer and then tweak a timestamp in the
database that could be checked, instead of writing a new blog entry for
every tracer email. It would test 90% of the machinery and catch closer to
99% of the problems we typically have. Zagy's suggestion is really exactly
the same except that instead we touch a file on the filesystem. By using a
mailin handler inside of Karl to do it, we still get to test almost the
entirety of the path, but we avoid a bunch of unnecessary database
transactions. So I'm in favor of this.