Re: test driven development for GNUstep

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 2 Feb 2004, at 15:06, Lars Sonchocky-Helldorf wrote:

> I think it would be good to employ the test driven development 
> methodology
> for developing GNUstep.
> Test driven development generally ensures a high qualtity of the source
> across several platforms (because everybody is able to run the relevant
> test on her/his platform of choice and send the test failures back). 
> For
> instance the GCC project employs test driven development in the form of
> DejaGnu: If you build GCC you can optionally run 'make -k check' to 
> run a
> test suite for GCC and send the results back to the GCC developers.
>
> Now there are several ways to do test driven development, on the ObjC 
> side
> of this world for instance DejaGnu 
> (http://www.gnu.org/software/dejagnu/)
> and ocunit (http://sente.epfl.ch/software/ocunit/). Anybody here knows
> which would be better suited for GNUstep library development? I hope 
> this
> will initiate a fruitfull discussion which results in the use of test
> driven development for GNUstep (in whatever form).

I wrote GNUstep-Guile/Greg as a replacement for DejaGnu because I found
it so horrible to use for testing the GNUstep libraries ...  I haven't 
used ocunit.

The only real problem with the existing testsuite is that it uses guile 
... which
is better than the tcl stuff used by dejagnu, but suffers from being a 
language
which is unfamiliar to everyone working on GNUstep (and I include 
myself).

I think if you want all developers to be able to trivially run the 
testsuite as part
of the development process, you need to write the test stuff using only 
make,
and shell scripts and ObjC code, and I think you need to have it all 
copyrighted
by the FSF so that it can be distributed as part of the GNUstep core.  
If the tests
aren't provided as part of the developer distribution, they probably 
won't be
used by many people.

While I would approve of such a project, I have the impression that 
there
would be opposition from others.