Re: burden of maintainance

[Eric Ludlam]

On 10/02/2015 09:36 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > From: address@hidden (Phillip Lord)
> > Cc: Andreas Röhler <address@hidden>,
> >    <address@hidden>
> > Date: Fri, 02 Oct 2015 12:58:48 +0100
> >
> > Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
> >
> > > Suggestions for how to improve our test suite without alienating
> > > potential contributors are welcome.
> >
> > I think for many potential contributors a richer test suite is likely to
> > lessen alienation rather than increase it.
>
> I meant if we require each contributor to accompany each commit with a
> test, that could prevent quite a few from contributing.

CEDET on SF has a pretty extensive test suite, and I still include fixes 
from folks without a test, usually adding a little test along the way. 
Fortunately for me, many of the test harnesses I've written make it 
trivial to add new points to it.   For smart completion for example, you 
can edit a test input file with a new location to try completion, and 
stick the answer next to it in a comment for that language.  The SRecode 
tests are usually just writing a template and adding a name to a list to 
try out new features there.  No need to write complex logic stuff.

A side effect is that new contributors who come by have been adding 
tests without me asking, which is super awesome!   A large part of that 
is having a rich test suite to copy from to make new tests easier.

So, that is my recommendation.  If more tests are desired in a 
particular area, a smart harness will allow a new feature to be tested 
quickly.  The best case is it can be tested by adding a text file 
somewhere that can be pulled in and processed.

The opposite is the eieio test suite which is long and all about complex 
lisp structures to test it out.  That kind of infrastructure is a bit 
harder to simplify.

Eric