A. Pagaltzis wrote:
The aggregator developers are actively hostile towards such
tests.
Really? I can only think of counterexamples, though my sample is
admittedly tiny. Who are the hostile ones?
I'm certain not all developers are hostile, but I've witnessed enough of
that kind of behaviour to put me off getting involved in this kind of thing.
Maybe I'm just being overly sensitive. If you haven't noticed or it doesn't
bother you that's great.
What sort of motivation would compel a developer to be
hostile toward tests?
The fact that you're putting a bunch of little X's next to their product.
And to make those X's go away they've got to take time off from whatever
they're currently working on (which is probably quite important to them) so
they can deal with your complaints (which in many cases will involve obscure
features of the spec that they'll never encounter in the wild).
Feed producers probably find informational tests more helpful
than conformance tests.
But they are the ones who stand to gain from consistent and
complete implementation of the standard, in the long term.
That's the thing. Conformance tests will never provide complete coverage of
the standard, because large portions of it are completely optional. They
need informational tests that can tell them whether the optional bits have
any degree of support or whether they're better off avoiding those features.
Regards
James
