Re: [dev] Testing suckless programs

From: hiro <23hiro_AT_gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2016 09:47:08 +0200

you don't need to learn a lot of C, C is rather small.
didn't read further than that, sorry.


On 4/29/16, Thomas Levine <__AT_thomaslevine.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I originally came across suckless about six years ago when I was looking
> at IRC clients and thus discovered ii. Since then I have periodically
> updated myself on suckless happenings and have always held the software
> in high regard. But I had never thought to contribute anything because
> I have pretty much never written C.
>
> I have been thinking about how I might contribute without learning a lot
> of C, and writing automated tests seems like a good thing. Many of the
> tools could be tested in sh instead, and this might even be preferable
> in some cases. And I probably can write decent tests in C without being
> particularly good at C because the test cases can be relatively
> straightforward. Also, the intended behaviors of suckless programs are
> usually obvious because they are so simple and well documented, so I
> think I understand them well enough to write appropriate tests.
>
> 1. Tell me if you would like to see tests for any particular
> project that you work on, and I might eventually write them.
> 2. Have you previously considered having someone who knows very
> little C write tests for suckless programs?
>
> Tom
>
> Postscript: I might also not write tests for any particular project.
> Because suckless programs are so simple in both implementation and
> interface, I suspect that maintaining a test suite would often provide
> little benefit compared to informal documentation that discusses the
> intended behavior of the program and mentions edge cases; I suspect that
> a program would need to meet at least one of the following criteria in
> order for automated testing to be very helpful.
>
> 1. The user interface is complex.
> 2. Supporting different environments is a large concern.
> 3. People have managed to break already-documented things by accident
> in patches.
>
> I even have my doubts that testing would be that helpful here, though,
> because of what I see in sbase. I consider sbase to have a relatively
> complex user interface, but it is quite developed and lacks automated
> tests; it has apparently done fine without automated tests.
>
>
Received on Fri Apr 29 2016 - 09:47:08 CEST