From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Sun, 30 Aug 2009 07:51:40 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Allow testing of _relative family of time formatting and parsing functions
Message-ID: <20090830075140.GB14217@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <81b0412b0908300025r4eeee84fyf0bfc3b2e940ff37@mail.gmail.com>

On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 09:25:11AM +0200, Alex Riesen wrote:

> > Is this intended as a serious submission for inclusion?
> 
> Not yet. AFAICS, test-date is never used in our test suite.

No, it isn't, but I think the point of this is to change that.
So it is useless without an extra patch to the test suite. I'll try to
put something together.

> Right, that's because I'm not sure myself. Frankly, I'm not
> convinced we have to test every single thing. In my experience,
> the bigger a test suite, the less are people inclined to use it
> (including setting up automatic test runs).
> 
> Jeff, Nicolas? Is this test enough? Are there any other code
> paths you want to include in the test?

I think this is a useful addition to the test suite. The bug David fixed
was obvious, but it sat for a year because of poor test coverage. Linus
fixed several approxidate bugs recently. The approxidate code is
notoriously temperamental, so it is a good thing to be checking for
regressions.

And I don't think our test suite is nearly big enough to start worrying
about getting people not to use it. Without CVS and SVN tests, I can run
it on 3-year-old hardware in less than a minute. Either you bother to
run it or not, but I doubt that adding one new test script is going to
break the bank.

-Peff