Hilarious dream-logic (was Re: [Twisted-Python] [patch] (etc)

Andrew Bennetts andrew-twisted at puzzling.org
Thu May 18 23:52:25 MDT 2006


On Fri, May 19, 2006 at 03:30:31PM +1000, Jonathan Lange wrote:
[...]
> provide strong evidence for its absence.  When fixing code, there must
> be some check that the fix is correct.  The check generally takes one
> of four forms: informal induction from the code; manual

I think often a combination of checks are used: in particular, reading the code
and seeing that the fix "makes sense" in addition to an empiricial demonstration
of absence (exercising the fixed bug manually or by automated test) is very
common.  A fix is rarely accepted if it doesn't "make sense", even if there's an
automated test case that suggests it works.

[...]
> 
> If you wish to argue against our requirement for unit tests, then you
> must persuade us either that the evidence they provide is not strong
> enough to provide the listed benefits, or that the work in writing
> unit tests is significantly greater than the work of not writing unit
> tests.

I think the problem may be different perspectives.

For Andrea, he's apparently already manually verified that his patches solve the
problems he's seen, so that's good enough.  Ignoring for a moment the issue of
what it takes to get it merged into official Twisted, further effort is wasted.

For people maintaining Twisted, a once-off manual verification isn't enough, for
the reasons you give.

So for Andrea's fixes to make the leap from "good enough for him" to "good
enough to be merged into Twisted", they need more work: they need automated
tests.

-Andrew.





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