Runtime-tests prerequsites should be clarified

[BurtHarris]

@parrt - updated: PR #1268 addresses one bug in testing on Windows, but doesn't really solve the core problem. Getting the runtime-tests to run on a new machine is very hard.

I found the sort of documentation I was looking for, but they all seem out-of-date, e.g. https://github.com/antlr/antlr4/wiki/How-to-build-ANTLR-itself, which is (now) labeled out of date. use maven. But the existing Maven automation is not sufficient to replace a document like this apparently once was... particularly if the target runtimes are consolidated into the same repository.

Maven doesn't install (or even test for) all the test dependencies like Python2.7 and Python3.x, and C# tools. When I first wrote up this issue, it seemed like this sort of confusion could be mitigated thru use of the Maven enforcer plugin, but digging into it, this maven & enforcer combination still seem very Java specific, and do not address issues like installing multiple python versions.

So it seems like better documentation is the best approach in the short term. Without it, potential contributors may give up and go away.

[parrt]

Ok, yeah, i'll try to improve this on my next pass through ANTLR-land. Oct/Nov.

[KvanTTT]

All ANTLR dependencies you can explore in travis-ci file: .travis.yml. I think that AppVeyor CI system also can be integrated into ANTLR for testing on Windows (testing issues with invalid paths etc.).

[BurtHarris]

Thanks, I'll look into AppVeyor CI, see if I can make sense of it.

[BurtHarris]

I've had some success getting AppVeyor CI build ANTLR4 on Windows, and with some tweaking the tests seem to be working as well. This has been easier than I thought because the AppVeyor worker machines have everything needed (and more) so nothing needs to be installed.

The 12K line log spew makes me unsure if it is really a healthy test pass, perhaps someone who knows runtime-tests better can review: https://ci.appveyor.com/project/BurtHarris/antlr4/build/4.5.4-SNAPSHOT+Appveyor.18

I've submitted PR #1292 to add appveyor.yml, as it seems like a step in the right direction.

I've been trying to diff the log files produced by appveyor.yml vs travisci, so far without much success. It seems like the tests are not running in the same sequence, which I don't understand.

[parrt]

@BurtHarris can I close this due to new doc etc...? AppVeyor seems to be building.