Re: burden of maintainance

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Thu, 01 Oct 2015 20:46:15 +0200
> From: Andreas Röhler <andreas.roehler@online.de>
> CC: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
> 
> > Suggestions for how to improve our test suite without alienating
> > potential contributors are welcome.
> 
> What about saying: no checkin before the tests passed?

That is OK, but what to do if some tests fail for many moons before
they are fixed?  We cannot stop development because of that.

> Coverage and quality of tests should be an integral part of developing.

That's the hard part.  Our current coverage is quite low (my
impression; it would be good to have some tool that can measure
that).  Worse, for interactive features (and there are a lot of them),
we lack the infrastructure for writing automated tests.  Also, I don't
quite see who will write tests for large portions of the C code, given
how few people are even prepared to work on that.  The result is that
getting closer to good coverage is a huge job.

> WRT to maintainance there are also redundancy, complexity which might be 
> worked on.

Alas, there are wildly different views on what is and isn't complex.

> Keeping an eye at the number of symbols - too many blow up the language, 
> make in harder for beginners than needed.

Which symbols did you have in mind?