Re: [ft-devel] source control, defect tracking and unit tests

[George Williams]

On Fri, 2005-02-04 at 01:46, Graham Asher wrote:
> Unit tests are obviously controversial:
I believe that some level of regression testing is useful. This may be
different from "unit test"s, I'm not up on current terminology.

I grew up in the world of compilers where there was a definite
right/wrong answer. A compiled program either did what it should, or it
did not.

FreeType is quite different, the output of a rasterization operation is
rather subjective and demanding exactly the same output is probably
wrong in general.

However there are areas that can benefit from regression testing. I have
a (small) testsuite for fontforge which makes sure ff can load a wide
variety of fonts and perform some standard transformations without
crashing.

Obviously it is by no means complete, but it has proven helpful.

One problem with such a testsuite is that of licenses. I can't
distribute mine because I am testing third party fonts. This may make it
less appealing in a multi-developer environment like freetype.