We *really* need a development model change !

[Geoff Thorpe]

On Friday 28 December 2001 05:00, Andreas Mohr wrote:
>
> Yes, IMHO we really need a C based test.

I'd go along with this. It seems that a variety of tests, written and 
contributed by a variety of people, and thus written in a variety of 
mutually inconsistent and collectively odd ways, is inevitable. Rather than 
people wasting their valuable time on rejigging any existing "modular 
extensible test framework" or writing anything new, the simplist way 
forward would surely be to document some simple input/output behaviours 
test programs should use.

Eg. as long as it is described what should and should not be sent by a test 
program to stdout+stderr, and what input (if any) should be supported on 
the command line and/or stdin, then you have achieved the only consistency 
that matters. A simple shell script could then, for example, control the 
level of debugging in any/all such tests by simply piping output(s) through 
egrep or whatever - stdout itself could be piped to /dev/null if necessary 
leaving only stderr, etc.

Let's face it - anyone adding new functionality to wine or working on 
anything non-trivial will be cooking up their own "foo.c" test programs on 
the fly when developing - the less work it takes for that developer to 
convert their foo.c into a test-foo32-api.c for use by test scripts, the 
better off everyone will be.

Let's also not forget, if that "standardised form" for input/output of the 
testing is as logical and uncomplicated as possible, more and more 
well-meaning code grunts will be capable of making useful contributions - 
be it clunky GUI wrappers for the testing suites (think what "make xconfig" 
did for linux kernel rebuilding), or by even taking the various foo.c test 
fragments from the wine developers and coaxing them into the standardised 
form on their behalfs.

If a "testing framework" is anything more complicated - the only people 
working on the test suites will be whoever defines/understands the "test 
framework specification" and the hard-core wine developers themselves. In 
other words, we won't get far.

Cheers,
Geoff