Re: call for more ert tests

[Dmitry Gutov]

Ted Zlatanov <address@hidden> writes:

> On Tue, 25 Jun 2013 22:44:48 +0200 Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <address@hidden> 
> wrote: 
>
> LMI> And I think that people writing other highly interactive and non-vital
> LMI> stuff has started to find this out in general the last few years.  On
> LMI> Hacker News there's constantly people popping up who've seen the light
> LMI> -- having too many automatic tests means ossifying the software.

Writing lots of poor (e.g. implementation-dependent) test will do that
for you. That doesn't mean that any such application won't benefit from
having at least some tests.

> In effect writing tests is like buying insurance.  Not everyone wants
> it, not everyone needs it.  Flood insurance for a mountaintop house is
> probably a bad investment, but in a flood zone it makes sense.

If you go along with this analogy to pick the kinds of tests to write
and pieces of code to explicitly test, I'll agree.

But automated testing in general can be useful for most kinds of
projects, at least to the degree that it replaces the need for manual
testing of nuts and bolts in that new feature you're writing.

> For the Emacs core, the maintainers
> have to make that decision as part of accepting a contribution.

It would be nice to annouce such a policy. Want this complex,
non-essential feature? Tests, please!