Re: Need for a Emacs regression test suite

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2007 09:20:58 +0530
> From: dhruva <dhruvakm@gmail.com>
> Cc: rms@gnu.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> For the UI part, I do not have an answer and no experience in X. I was
> wondering if we can have a start time flag which can map the keyboard
> and mouse to a port instead of the real mouse and keyboard. We can
> have a program that can feed the events to that port. The 'select'
> will be listening on that port (instead of keyboard/mouse). Looks like
> it is theoretically possible but not sure if practically feasible.

I'd suggest first to crack the problem of testing the non-interactive
parts of Emacs, and postponing the UI part for later.  After all, most
of Emacs code -- the parts written in Lisp, and a significant portion
of C primitives -- are not related to the display engine, so having a
way to regression-test them alone would be a huge win.

I'm not saying that testing display and input events is not important,
just that the first approximation to a test suite does not need to
solve all the problems at once, in order to be useful.  Especially
since the solution to automated UI exercising will probably end up
being platform-specific, so will need to be tackled separately for
each platform.