On 8/11/06, Larry Wall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Just to avoid repeating some of the discussion, here's a link to #perl6:http://colabti.de/irclogger/irclogger_log/perl6?date=2006-08-07,Mon&sel=110#l193 The discussion goes on and off for most of the rest of the page, so you probably want to search for and highlight "todo" if you're using firefox.
thanks for the link, i didn't know #perl6 was logged. for those of you who may not know, on that channel i'm known as "[particle]".
Anyway, we thrashed the internal/external question pretty hard, and the rough consensus was to leave todos with the tests for now, but move to a todo() function that is easy to isolate, visually if nothing else. My own take on it is that we can just define the "official" tests to be the parts outside of todo() calls for now.
that take seems to me like a particularly interesting form of blindness. however, it is a blindness that we (perl6 language implementors) would all share. using this definition, it seems we the blind should all be able to eventually describe this "official" elephant.
But Jerry raises a lot of good questions that need to be answered over the long haul. Certainly by the time we have a real 6.0 we'll need to have worked out the policy and polity issues. For now, my gut feeling is that we'll need at least four times as many tests as we have so far, and rapid test development is best served by exercising the least amount of control. Trying to lock it down too early will simply stall the process for most of the million monkeys who are currently writing tests. Version control is our best friend here, at least for now. Trouble tickets are probably premature unless they're *very* lightweight.
true, my questions are mainly "long haul." i agree that control to the test repo should not *yet* be limited, so we can maintain our (seemingly quickening) pace of perl6 development. i don't intend to fix what isn't broken. the timely questions are those related to design, and implementation thereof. it is here where i hope suggestions like darren's (thanks!) and those from others with test design experience can lend a hand. ~jerry
