On Mon, 2006-12-11 at 17:56 +0100, Jim Meyering wrote: > Just a minor correction: creating precise and portable tests *can* > be quite onerous, in that preparing good tests takes time and energy. > But it is well worth the effort. Note however, that sometimes it is very > hard to test for a fix.
I agree there are certainly cases that you can't easily unit test. For example if you have to run some program continuously for hours to get it to core because of some nasty race, it clearly isn't reasonable to add a unit test that runs for days! On the other hand it would be very reasonable to create a stress test suite that is periodically run for days at a time in an attempt to catch leaks, races an the like. It's also true that trying to retroactively add tests to a system that grew up without them can be very painful, which is why I think it's particularly important to harp on this issue now for a young project like Qpid. So perhaps I made too sweeping a statement, but I stand by the contention that 90% of the time there is no excuse for a commit that causes a net reduction in the projects test coverage. Cheers, Alan.
