spam,Re: Testing reports

[John Ralls]

On Apr 11, 2012, at 5:06 AM, Colin Scott wrote:

> 
>> I would argue that case inversion like this doesn't necessarily 
>> require a good reason, but that's a minor detail.
> 
> Are you saying that you are happy for the output to change without that change being the planned result of a deliberate, targetted, action?  I would be *very* unhappy were any program of mine to behave that way!

Speaking for myself, not Derek:

Absolutely. If I rip out the custom HTML generator in favor of building a DOM tree in code, and then use libxml's write_to_string() to create the report, then no, I would expect good tests to tell me if important content had changed but to pass if the only changes were things like the case of the tags or whitespace in text sections. Doing otherwise pretty much describes a brittle test.

To take it a bit further, suppose that libxml on Win32 emits capitalized tags, but on Debian Wheezy it generates lower-case tags.
I need to have "make distcheck" pass in order to generate the distribution in each case, and having to #ifdef tests for for the OS for something stupid like that would be a major pain.

Regards,
John Ralls