Re: atf for libcurses

[Brett Lymn <blymn%baea.com.au@localhost>]

On Thu, Nov 04, 2010 at 06:46:48PM -0700, Paul Goyette wrote:
> 
> Your reasoning seems to imply that, if we were to change libcurses to 
> use a different, more optimum character sequence to generate a specific 
> screen appearance, that would be considered a regression.  I disagree 
> with that reasoning.
> 

well, so do I.  I am not sure where that implication came from.  If
someone changes the code to optimise the character sequence then that
is excellent - the test should be updated to reflect the new output.
What I did not want to do is blindly enshrine a suboptimal behaviour
into a test and then have people assume it must be ok because it
passed the test.

> It is not libcurse's job to generate a specific character sequence, but 
> to produce a specific appearance.  The fact that it uses a character 
> sequence to produce that appearance is an implementation detail, and 
> should not be the target of a regression test.
> 

errr... I really cannot understand this - we have a chunk of software
that should, modulo bugs, react the same every time you feed the same
calls into it you should get the same output.  People seem to be
implying that curses randomly switches outputs around from run to
run.  Believe me, it doesn't.  I have been helping maintain curses for
quite a while, I do know a fair bit about the guts of it.  What I have
done is based on a reasonably good grasp of what goes on inside the
library.  I am confident the methodology is sound.

-- 
Brett Lymn
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