Re: [Groff] Bug in html backend

[Mark Veltzer]

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On Friday 16 August 2002 08:57, you wrote:
> > BTW: Why wont you add such a regression test to the groff source?
> > At the end of the install a user could do "make test" and it will
> > attempt to convert various manual pages to various formats and will
> > run various tests on them...  This will increase the quality of new
> > releases of groff since a new release won't be made until the
> > regression test passes on the maintainers machines.  This will also
> > increase the level of bug reporting since you could just tell the
> > users that are having problems "could you please send me the output
> > of "make test" ?". Just a thought.
>
> Excellent idea.  Do you volunteer to add that?  Ideally, the
> regression test should be as complete as Knuth's trip test for TeX --
> this tests more than 99% of the code :-)

No problem. I can do that. What script language do you prefer (I prefer perl 
but that is my own taste). Since the regression test suite is a non critical 
part of the system it's not a "requirement" of groff (meaning users that are 
installing groff dont HAVE to run the regression test suite). This means that 
we can afford to use some high level language like Perl/Python or whatever 
and not worry about making unreasonable requirements from the users.

My current idea is to get some pretty offensive manual pages and convert them 
using various back ends. I'll throw in a binary file which is not a manual 
page at all in there too (just to make sure that groff is not going into 
endless loop or crashes). As time goes by and as people report bugs it will 
be the job of the maintainers (you) to add files which caused problems 
(crashes, endless lopps) to groff. A directory structure like this will do:

$groff_root/regression/[man|html|ps|dvi|ascii]

I will put correct results of the conversion process there too (mind you that 
will will make the groff distribution bigger) and will compare the results on 
the users machine with the expected results (this will test that the 
conversion process works correctly and not just survives the conversion 
process itself). People wishing to add tests for specific things could just 
make small manual pages with the feature they want to test and add it with 
the expected results to the appropriate directories. The regression test 
suite will automatically run over those too (the script will not have the 
list of regression files hardcoded - it will just scan the man directory and 
go from there).

What do people think ? Please comment before I get to work about problems 
with the scheme I presented...

Another question: what is the address of the cvs server and can I pull the 
latest version off of it ? (So I can work versus the latest version and so I 
could get the latest bug fixes...).

Can I send the patches in unified diff format ?

Mark

>
>
>     Werner
> _______________________________________________
> Groff maillist  -  address@hidden
> http://ffii.org/mailman/listinfo/groff

- -- 
Name: Mark Veltzer
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