[webkit-dev] can we stop using Skipped files?

[Balazs Kelemen]

>
>     So the unit tests are superfluous.  In particular, if I had to
>     pick between only having unit tests or only having regression
>     tests, I might pick unit tests.  But if I already have regression
>     tests then I'm unlikely to want to incur technical debt to build
>     unit tests, particularly since unit tests requiring changing the
>     infrastructure to make the code more testable, which then leads to
>     the problems listed above.
>
>
> There are many code paths are used rarely. In practice, we were having 
> regressions frequently when people modified the code. Since the 
> codebase has been unittested, the rate of regressions has gone down 
> considerably. The time you spend dealing with tests is considerably 
> less than the time you spend rolling patches in an out as you 
> encounter different edge cases that different configurations/flags hit.

A quick note to unittests. I think it's easy to define a hard limit for 
unittests, which is that: if I want to add a feature, or some 
customizing option for a particular port, it should be less effort to 
write the unittest than to write the actual code. I heard from my 
colleges a few times that it's not always the case with nrwt. I can 
imagine that it's not trivial to setup the unittest system for a module 
that has not been unittested so far but I think it should rather be the 
job of those who are actively working on the test harness, not of those 
who just need some work to be done for their port.
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