Re: emacs test suite

[Robert Anderson]

On Sat, 2003-01-18 at 22:00, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 18 Jan 2003, Robert Anderson wrote:
> 
> > >We use CVS--isn't that suitable?
> > 
> > It's reasonable, but has some limitations.  For example, I am
> > potentially interested in maintaining a set of tests, but you are
> > not convinced of the utility of them and so you'd rather not have
> > them in your CVS - so you don't give me write access.
> 
> We have CVS branches for that; a couple of them already exist for 
> specialized features people work on.  So I don't see any problem here.
> 
> > If instead I had a branch that I could store locally (this is the
> > "distributed" part), I could version control my own work,
> > continue to incorporate your changes, and as it became more
> > useful, you could at some point decide that you'd like to merge
> > my branch into your sources
> 
> That's cool, but why do you need the branch to be local?

Well, I don't "need" it to be - this is only a matter of convenience. 
But it would be nice if this didn't even require discussion or Richard
having to make a decision apriori about whether my work is credible
before he has even seen it.  If the branch was local, I would just get
to work, and everyone could worry about these decisions later when it
was more than vaporware, saving valuable coordinate effort.

  Why not start a 
> branch in the Emacs CVS?  If you agree not to check in changes into the 
> trunk (assuming we don't want them on the trunk, about which I'm unsure, 
> see below), I don't see any problems granting you write access to the CVS 
> tree.  It's Richard's decision, but I don't see why would he refuse.
> 
> Moreover, I don't even see why would we request that the changes be on a 
> branch.  A test suite by definition is mostly orthogonal to the sources 
> being tested.  I expect it to be in a separate directory, with only minor 
> influence on the files in other directories (perhaps some simple change 
> in some Makefile.in or so).
> 
> Therefore, even a branch does not seem to be necessary.
> 
> Am I missing something?

Only that, were the branch local, this discussion would be unnecessary -
I would just start working and only "bother" you guys and take your
valuable time when it became more mission critical, i.e., there was code
suitable for a merge.  For the test suite in particular, you are right
that inherent orthogonality makes it less of an issue.

On a more general note, let me lurk for awhile and get a feel for what
kinds of bugs might be easily addressable with test cases before we get
into write access or branching decisions.

Bob