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

[Adam Barth]

On Sun, Jun 10, 2012 at 4:54 AM, Balazs Kelemen <kbalazs at webkit.org> wrote:

> 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.
>

My experience with code in general (and Python in particular) is that code
that isn't tested is broken.  It's certainly true that several important
parts of NRWT weren't designed with testing in mind, but that's something
we should fix rather than piling on untested features.

That said, I'm not actively working on NRWT much these days, and I'm happy
to defer to the folks who are as to what they think is best for the
long-term health of this code.

Adam
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