Re: Overall bitrot, package reviews and fast(er) unmaintained package removals
"Potter, Tim (HPE Linux Support)" <timothy.potter@hpe.com> writes:
> On 7 Apr 2016, at 11:18 AM, Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> wrote:
>> You are missing the point, which is that while they still build with
>> the new toolchain (possibly after a developer without intimate
>> knowledge of the program makes a best-effort fix) we don't know that
>> they behave the same way.
>
> OK - good point. I wonder if there is any information about how many packages
> run unit tests? It would be interesting to see the data.
When we speak about "historic" science packages, they often don't have
this. What they usually have is a kind of manual test, where one has to
look for some graphs, interpret them and decide whether the result is OK.
And usually the code quality is quite poor; there are workarounds and
uncommented dirty stuff to speed things upm that really cannot give
exactly the same result on modern computers.
However, the scientist still trust these programs, and so it makes sense
to keep them. And often, there is just no modern replacement.
Best regards
Ole
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