[darcs-users] managing change

[Dan Pascu]

On Monday 09 February 2009, zooko wrote:
> Really, are we sure that there are *any* potential contributors who
> are turned off by testing requirements?

I don't think that anyone argues against the benefits of a good testing 
procedure.

> I am well aware of some 
> Twisted contributors who were turned off, but that wasn't because of
> the testing requirement, that was because of the *review*
> requirement, because nobody would get around to reviewing your patch
> and it wouldn't go anywhere.  That sort of open-ended delay is
> certainly a major turn-off. I'm not sure that I'm really aware of 
> any contributor who decided not to contribute to something because of
> testing standards.

That's my point exactly. Adding a such a testing requirement to a project, 
goes hand in hand with a delayed acceptance and more work to get code in. 
Patches will still need review, otherwise one can write dummy tests that 
always pass just to get something in, but this time the review has to be 
more thorough because the reviewer also has to understand if the provided 
test suite covers all the relevant cases.

What I meant is not that adding a test case to their code may turn people 
off, but having to make a bigger effort and to wait much longer until 
something is accepted may turn people off.

I know how frustrating it can be to get even a trivial 1 line fix to 
remove a circular memory reference in twisted. Faced with this situation, 
contributors may choose to live with the problem or work around it in 
their code than to wait for months (literally) to get a trivial fix in.

-- 
Dan