On Thu, May 18, 2006 at 09:25:07PM +0200, Andrea Arcangeli wrote: [...]
Specifically I never said unittest are a waste of time, I only said that I don't have time to write unittests and that lack of unittests should not prevent valid bugfixes to be included and I think this is a very reasonable development approach. We can argue about features or huge changes, but I think valid bugfixes should not require unittests.
We, the people that have to *maintain* Twisted, think valid bugfixes require unittests. Our experience is that without them, bugs are doomed to reoccur and reoccur between releases as other bugs are "fixed" that we may as well not pretend to have fixed it in the first place. It's the same principle as commenting code and following cosmetic coding standards about whitespace. The presence of the test doesn't directly make the software more correct -- you could delete it and the code would still work exactly as it did with the test on the filesystem, and similarly ugly code and uncommented code isn't necessarily buggy code. But these things help maintainers applying patches and developers doing new work keep it correct, and avoid wasting their time wondering why an apparently innocuous change does something unexpected. And avoid wasting our time fixing the same bugs over and over again. This is why we are so strict about requiring tests with bug fixes. You might not have time to write the tests, but *we* don't have the time to deal with new code without tests, even if it is apparently more correct. Thus it is part of our coding standard now (although it hasn't been written down anywhere I'm aware of, you have certainly been told it is on many occasions). If you cannot follow the coding standards for a project, then don't be offended if that project doesn't apply your patches. -Andrew.