Stéfan van der Walt wrote:
2009/1/9 David Cournapeau <cournape@gmail.com>:
On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 5:36 AM, Christopher Hanley <chanley@stsci.edu> wrote:
I do not expect the trunk to always work. I even expect it to have bugs. However, I do not expect there to be test failures for known reasons that result in wasSuccessful() returning false. This is a bad programming practice. It creates work for people trying to figure out what is wrong when the answer is already know.
Well, I don't agree it is bad practice: it is not ideal, yes, but I don't think using KnownFailure is much better. My rationale being that known failures are almost never worked on because it does not bug anyone anymore, and it is very easy to forget about them - AFAICS, most numpy/scipy known failures have never been worked on after being tagged as such. I don't think we have a good system for those cases, be it known failure - or just failing.
I agree with you point of view, but I also have sympathy for Cristopher's situation.
Yes, it is not a black and white situation - I first misunderstood Christopher situation because of the given context of tracking numpy changes. I can see why it is annoying - but it gives me important information (like for example the fact that solaris does not have the same formatting issues than linux and mac os X thanks to recent bug reports). As Robert said, BTS is supposedly a better system for this for this kind of things - but at least for me, trac is so slow and painful to use that I try to avoid it as much as possible. David