[darcs-users] fwd: volunteers with always-on boxes sought for automated testing

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

David Roundy writes:

 > There's also the factor that additional buildbots without additional folks
 > willing to help debug are likely to be more of a burden than a help.  It's
 > far more common to have portability bugs in our test scripts than in darcs
 > itself, and I'm not going to waste my time fixing bugs in test scripts when
 > I could be fixing bugs in darcs.  Or at least, I shouldn't be doing that.

The test scripts are part of darcs.  Thinking that they're not, just
because they aren't executed by users in ordinary use, is a big
mistake IMHO.

If you're unwilling to support the test scripts on some platform,
Possibily you should go all the way and declare that Darcs is not
supported at all on that platform, even if it happens to work.

Haskell must have a unit test framework, and maybe even something like
Python's doctests.  It might quickly repay the effort put into
translating anything that depends on Unix shells into such frameworks.