Re: burden of maintainance

["Andreas Röhler" <andreas.roehler@online.de>]

Am 01.10.2015 um 21:09 schrieb Eli Zaretskii:
>> 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.

Let's understand tests as valid ones and checkins as non-trivial.

It would suffice to put intelligent test-writing into the focus - where 
it's not yet or not yet to extend it deserves.


>
>> 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.

Let's note that.

>    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.

Estimating one hour invested in writing the right tests might save 
ten-fold or more of development time afterwards.


>    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?
>
>
>

Not a special one at the moment. Just got the feeling the collection of 
used symbols were growing and growing last years.