Re: call for more ert tests

[Rüdiger Sonderfeld]

On Monday 24 June 2013 21:21:50 Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> IMO, unless we require every new feature to come with a test and a
> report that no regressions were found by running the existing tests,
> we will never get any better testability than what we have now.

I think one problem is that it's hard to write tests for many Emacs features 
and the results might not really help to improve the code quality.  E.g., the 
new browser eww.  There could certainly be some tests for lower level 
features.  But a real test coverage would require tests for the rendered 
layout.  Which would be hard to write and even worse probably breaking all the 
time when rendering is improved and thus the output changes.

Therefore having a policy to demand tests for new features might be counter 
productive.  On the other hand maintainers should at least ask for test cases 
when they think a new feature could benefit from tests.  Which in my 
experience, as somebody who is relatively new to contributing to Emacs, does 
not seem to happen at all.

An automated test report would certainly improve things.  The Gnus folks seem 
to use http://buildbot.net/.

Regards
Rüdiger