[pmwiki-users] Testing and quality control (Was: Pre-announcing 2.2.0 non-beta release)

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Thu Jan 22 08:53:21 CST 2009


On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 10:08:54AM +0100, Christian Ridderström wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Jan 2009, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
>> So, "[there] should be a quality control [...] of PmWiki extensions"  
>> is another one of those places that I fear handwaves away the difficult 
>> part of the whole problem.  :-)
>
> I'd like to rephrase that as: 'So, "[there] should be a quality control  
> [...] of PmWiki and its extensions"'.
>
>> Indeed, if it was easy, we'd probably already be doing it.  :-)
>
> True, but I believe there are some things we can do, especially in terms  
> of testing. I don't think we'd ever be able to do complete tests, but I  
> also don't believe this means we should skip trying to do some simple  
> tests.

I'm a very big fan of automated testing.  That said, in the very
early days of working on PmWiki 2.0 (yes, 2.0), I was developing
PmWiki with a testing system in place.  It didn't work out very
well in the long run.  Perhaps this is because of the tools I had
available for doing the testing, but after maintaining it the
testing subsystem for many months I found it to be a much bigger
drain on my time/resources than benefit I was receiving for it,
so I abandoned it.

I'd welcome a way for us to have automated tests for PmWiki,
and I think we can support it on pmwiki.org.  However, I
warn that it's not as trivial as it sounds at first, and
someone other than me will need to implement a prototype or
proof-of-concept.

I also agree with Petko that I'd prefer that pmwiki.org not
become the central testing system for all recipes.  I'll
comment more on this in a reply to his message.

Pm



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