On Feb 16, 2012, at 2:57 PM, Ken Moffat wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 02:22:08PM -0800, Qrux wrote:
>>
>> In principle, I think testsuites are awesome; I like the confidence they
>> give that the system works as advertised.
>>
> In practice, I find them full of false failures - often, google
> knows that the particular test always fails, occasionally there is
> even a fix to make it work or to just drop the failing test. More
> often, any fix doesn't apply, or doesn't solve the failure.
> Meanwhile, I've seen all sorts of weird and wonderful bugs in
> desktop programs over the years - but I've never seen one that
> was caught by the testsuite.
Are you referring specifically to X11-related test suites?
Because, despite personally loving tests in principle, I'd be willing to divide
the book (in concept--not proposing any major reorgs, Bruce) into "stuff you
can-and-should test" and "everything else". IMO, X and devices (e.g.,
scanners, non-keyboard USB devices, printers, audio) fall on the latter side of
that line. Most other things can--and should be--tested. By "most other
things", I think of stuff like openssl where a single test failure is a sign of
a major problem that deserves much attention.
I think once you get into X, you're so deep into userland that it may not even
matter to test stuff. And, this is not an attempt to disparage X or GUIs; I've
run Motif, twm, fvwm, wmaker, and finally KDE desktops for many years, before I
finally switched to Mac OS for UI--heck, I've even own the X11 manuals, and
have written code from the blue book. :) But, testing GUI apps is hard, and
may not be particularly relevant.
The one gray area would be libraries embedded in GUI apps, and a STRONG warning
should be attached to any package that owns libraries that become dependencies
for other software (i.e., they cannot be--or are not commonly--separated out
from the GUI part of the app).
Q
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