Re: test directory

[Kein-Hong Man <mkh@...>]

Roberto Ierusalimschy wrote:
> [snip]
> (Kein-Hong Man wrote:)
> > Ideally of course, I would love to have a test suite in the Lua
> > tarball, but I'm okay with any decision.
>
> We do not like this idea. It is too dificult to have tests that are both
> portable and complete. (E.g., testing comand-line options, environment
> variables like LUA_PATH and LUA_INIT, submodules, C modules, not to
> mention limitations in machine resources).  Moreover, it is quite common
> for some tests to fail due to bugs in libc. A complete (hard) test suite
> "too public" creates too much noise.

A separate tarball is fine. I agree that testing for a multitude 
of different platforms is a big hassle. I suggest, though, that 
the test suite to be located as a download on the official Lua 
site if you wish to retain control, or Luaforge if you wish to 
open up development (perhaps, on a fork of it.)

> > I would be very interested in helping to create a serious test 
> > suite for Lua.
>
> I guess our suite is quite "serious" already :)

Sorry, the 'serious' bit came out the wrong way. I found the test 
suite very comprehensive myself. What I meant was that the test 
suite in its current form seems to be mainly used by the 
developers of Lua only. So by 'serious' I was trying to say 'in 
widespread use'.

I hope the test suite can see more widespread use, especially by 
people who use Lua in their applications. By doing so, some people 
who use the test suite might end up helping with the "portability 
and completeness" bit. Perhaps if other projects can have bug 
squashing campaigns, we can have a test suite running campaign. 
With some help from the community, Lua might then be able to boast 
of test suite profiles for Win32, *nix, PS2, Xbox, etc. Of course, 
it won't be all plain sailing, as a test suite by its very nature 
is supposed to attract problems.

--
Cheers,
Kein-Hong Man (esq.)
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia