Re: Need for a Emacs regression test suite

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

"Lennart Borgman (gmail)" <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> writes:

> David Kastrup wrote:
>> I would suggest that you are careful not to invest too much
>> Emacs-specific work that might be lost ultimately due to legal
>> reasons, though this warning might appear somewhat premature at the
>> moment.
>
> Could not the testing framework be used by developers even if there
> are some legal problems with it?

Using third-party tools should not constitute a problem when they are
licensed under appropriate terms.  But in this case the main modus of
operandi means extending the test case base, and that implies an
investment of work.  So there is some desire to not make this sort of
work entangled with code where it is not clear that we will always be
able to use it, or distribute it.

The GNU project has always tried to keep core components of the GNU
system copyrighted by the FSF.  If a testing suite becomes an integral
part of developing Emacs, something that we rely on, it would be
desirable to have this the case here as well.

That does not mean that it would be impossible to work with it
otherwise, but if we have a chance of ensuring this, it would be
better to do so.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum