On Wed, 2005-06-08 at 22:51 +0100, Esteban Manchado Velázquez wrote: > As perhaps you already know, I've been working a little in a testsuite > framework for dpkg. It's maintained as an Arch branch, publicly available at > http://people.debian.org/~zoso/arch/2005-debian/dpkg/dpkg--test/ . > > I don't have a lot done, but I would like to discuss it before doing too > much, anyway. Now that we managed to get Sarge out of the door, I guess this > is a good time to send a reminder. > I'm still very much in favour of having a test suite for dpkg, and would love to reach high rates of coverage for the system. One thing that's worth noting is that dpkg isn't tied to the Debian release schedule, I've only had brief discussions so far with the Debian Release Management team about whether etch should carry 1.10, 1.13 or perhaps a hybrid of the two. It largely depends on how long the etch process is intended to take, and how long it takes to complete the 1.13 cycle. My main concerns so far with test suites is that the suite be: 1) easy for users and casual developers to run, and be able to quickly identify failed tests and use them to fix the code. 2) sufficiently easy to use to encourage developers to write tests with every code modification they make, and even with every bug fix. 3) not require exotic or unusual support platforms or languages. I've not yet come across an off-the-shelf suite that manages this for C; perhaps I'm a bit spoiled by pyunit and doctest, but I want something approaching that level of usability. DejaGNU in particular doesn't seem to manage to satisfy any of these three concerns, the output of the suite is hard to use, the tests and especially C unit tests are hard to write and it requires TCL which is so widely incompatible with itself and no longer anywhere approaching a usual support platform. That being said, I did have some interesting discussions with tridge at LCA about how they test the samba suite. I think the subject is still very much open, and I welcome people with ideas about how to do it. Scott -- Have you ever, ever felt like this? Had strange things happen? Are you going round the twist?
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part