We *really* need a development model change !

[Andreas Mohr]

[omitting comments about very nice "make test" framework]

On Sun, Dec 30, 2001 at 12:34:06PM -0800, Alexandre Julliard wrote:
> Andriy Palamarchuk <apa3a at yahoo.com> writes:
> 
> > 1) The discussion started from John Sturtz post, who
> > created the Perl module for Win32 functions.
> > Discussion what is better - C or Perl for unit testing
> > started later as I understand there was no conclusion.
> > Now I can assume that this topic was not "discussed to
> > death" and we can do it now ;-)
> 
> OK you are right, it was discussed to death inside CodeWeavers, but
> not all of that was public. Basically the argument is that some sort
Hmm right.
I really should have remembered the extent of these discussions.

> of scripting language is better than plain C for two reasons:
> 
> 1. It is much easier to install under Windows than a full development
>   environment, and we don't have to worry about supporting a dozen
>   different compilers. We can simply provide a zip file containing the
>   compiled script interpreter, and people can be up and running in
>   seconds.
That one goes to you, I guess.

> There are probably a number of things you cannot do from Perl, like
> threads or exception handling, and for that we will want some kind of
> C framework too. But I believe we can already go a long way with the
> Perl stuff we have today. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe it's really unusable
> and we need to scrap it and redo a C environment from scratch; but we
> won't know that until we try to use it seriously.
...at which point we already have a huge data collection of "known
expected function behaviour" that's just waiting for us to port it easily
to C then or so...

Hmm, and different "winver" settings for testing of the behaviour of
different Wine --winver settings and adapting to different Windows versions
are possible with this framework, too ?
(we'd very much want to have that, I guess)

Oh, and what about Win16 support of the test suite ?
This is why I started this in the first place.
I'm very much afraid of losing HUGE amounts of Win16 compatibility
due to everybody using more and more Win32 programs only...

I haven't toyed with the "make test" environment yet (severe lack of time
- exam time), so I don't know much about it.
Unfortunately I'm afraid I won't have much time in the foreseeable future
either.

Still, I think we should try to have a C "compatibility" layer, too, for
two reasons:
- people who aren't familiar with anything else
- supporting diversity (what if someday we find out that perl "sucks" ? :-)

That's it for now,

Andreas (who'd really like to be able to contribute more to this now)