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Re: misleading error message from variable modifier


From: don fong
Subject: Re: misleading error message from variable modifier
Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2018 13:45:35 -0800

Chet, thanks for the explanation about CHANGES.  i am not familiar with the
bash release process.

as for this:

> I didn't think the tests were necessary.

what standard are you using to judge whether tests are necessary?  does the
bash project have any coverage metrics?

on general principles, when someone makes a change, there ought to be a
test to show that it does what it's supposed to.  that's just good
engineering.  there also ought to be sufficient pre-existing tests to show
that the change didn't break anything else.  that goes double when patches
are being submitted by outsiders and newcomers (like me).

before i submitted my patch, i looked around in the test directory to see
if there were any tests that covered the behavior i was changing.  i didn't
see any tests of the variable modifiers at all.  that struck me as a
situation that should be changed.  so i added some tests to cover my own
change plus a bit more.

as far as i can tell, the vast majority of the C code here seems to lack
unit tests as well.

for a widely used program like bash, IMHO it'd be worthwhile to have
automated tests (either unit tests or functional tests) that cover every
documented feature.

if that hasn't been the case in the past, i propose that it be adopted as a
new goal.  there should at least be a rule that all new code should be
covered by tests.  i'm astonished to learn that the tests that i
contributed were simply discarded.






On Fri, Mar 2, 2018 at 12:21 PM, Chet Ramey <chet.ramey@case.edu> wrote:

> On 3/1/18 11:37 PM, don fong wrote:
> > Chet, thanks.  in subst.c there is code that looks similar to what i had
> > suggested.  but i don't see the tests that i submitted.  i also don't see
> > the change listed in CHANGES?
>
> I didn't think the tests were necessary. And the ChangeLog file is the
> one to look at (eventually resolves to CWRU/CWRU.chlog, as Clark noted).
> The CHANGES file is updated as part of release engineering; as you might
> suspect, I'm working on bash-5.0-alpha.
>
> Chet
>
> --
> ``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
>                  ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
> Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/
>


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