We *really* need a development model change !

[Dimitrie O. Paun]

On Tue, 8 Jan 2002, Alexandre Julliard wrote:

> I personally think Perl would be a better choice, but I seem to be
> pretty much the only one of this opinion. In any case the most
> important thing is to choose something that people are going to use,
> and so far the Perl stuff isn't a success in this respect. I'm not
> convinced a C infrastructure would fare better, but maybe we should
> try it and see.

And this is an excellent point. I, for one, know enough Perl to know that
I find it ugly as bloody hell, and as such I have no desire to learn it.
Writing tests is a big pain in the ass in the first place, and I can tell
you I would not do it in Perl if I was paid to do it.

Now, I kept quiet on this issue because I can see the merits of using a
scripting language to write said tests. However, I would like to point out
that the _hard_ problem is getting the tests written, it doesn't really
matter in what language. If the infrastructure (compiler, libs, etc) is
not present on the current platform (configure is the 'man'), it is
trivial enough to simply not run them (or run some dummied up tests
instead, something like true(1)).

So, bottom line, I think you should accept whatever tests you get. If the
author gets a woody writing them in C, or using some test harness or
another, let's just consider it the motivating factor behind writing the
tests in the first place.

--
Dimi.