I would be interested in maintaining the test suite. I've just joined
the contributor liaison team but I'm definitely not an Emacs Lisp
rookie. I also know ert very well as I've spent the past year working
on a property-based testing project that wraps ert.

Le lun. 18 mai 2026 à 17:41, Bastien Guerry <[email protected]> a écrit :
>
> Hi Sławomir and Morgan,
>
> Thanks for this interesting discussion.
>
> Sławomir Grochowski <[email protected]> writes:
>
> > I do see the tension with what Ihor wrote in that thread, and with the
> > paragraph he added to testing/README in e1ef98202: tests in Org are
> > sometimes the only reference for how the code *should* behave, so a
> > passing assertion of awkward behavior can be misread as "this oddity is
> > intentional".  That is a fair worry.  Where I would push back gently is
> > that the worry is about how the test *reads*, not about whether the
> > knowledge it captures is worth having -- and reading can be fixed with a
> > comment or docstring ("this pins current behavior that surprised the
> > author; see <thread>; the desired behavior is X"), in a way that
> > ":expected-result :failed" cannot, because :failed silently drops out of
> > a green run and gives the next reader nothing to grab onto.
>
> Tests either succeed or fail based on the expected behaviour.
>
> I can see how characterisation "tests" could be useful for mapping the
> existing behaviours, but I find it confusing to call them "tests".  I'd
> call them "records" because they just record a behavior.
>
> Adding characterisation records that describe the current behaviour
> would probably create a maintenance burden because you would end up
> maintaining code that is not so useful: failed characterisation "tests"
> do not indicate what needs to be fixed (the behaviour or the test).
>
> I'm not saying it's completely useless, I see your point, but the
> usefulness-to-maintenance ratio seems too low to me. So I agree with the
> approach from testing/README: "The tests are usually designed aiming to
> ensure the *expected* Org mode behavior."
>
> Also, we had a test suite that we used to run every few hours against
> main/maint, and we stopped it because it is unmaintained - if someone
> wants to maintain this, we can set it up again.
>
> --
>  Bastien
>

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