[developers] Trouble Seeing Test Suite Instances

[Stephan Oepen]

> one thing we did differently
> the time that things worked fine was that we didn't load the grammar
> before trying to create tsdb instances.

this makes me wonder whether the grammar maybe contains an assignment
to *tsdb-home* or call to the (tsdb :home ...) function?  when users
are creative well above the average, it is possible for the [incr
tsdb()] podium and the back-end lisp system to hold different values
for this (crucial) variable; this would potentially lead to
(seemingly) very surprising behavior.

i would generally advise against setting [incr tsdb()] parameters as
part of grammar code.  per-user adjustments can be made in ‘.tsdbrc’
(in the user home directory), e.g. calls to (tsdb :home ...), (tsdb
:skeletons ...), and such should typically go there, in my view.

best, oe