update stream policy

Doug Way dway at mailcan.com
Mon Jan 19 06:31:40 UTC 2004


On Saturday, January 17, 2004, at 02:37 PM, ducasse wrote:

> For me the most important point is that test should be in basic image, 
> full image and alpha. If we consider tests as documentation
> why don't we bundle them together. Why do not we also put class 
> comment in a separate package.
> This is an education point. I will not repeat again what I say about 
> that. Everybody can read any XP book or other stuff to see the value 
> of tests.
> ...
> Now the changeset systemNotifier are blocked in the update stream 
> because they contain tests!!! Coooooollllll

I am still catching up on this thread and will reply more later, but I 
should mention that I only left these out of the update stream for now 
because it was still unresolved as to how these tests should be 
incorporated.  We should definitely be able to get the systemNotifier 
stuff into 3.7 before beta.

I do think that tests should be present in the alpha image.  Previously 
they were all in Marcus' package... perhaps letting you add them 
directly to the update stream via harvesting would be easiest.  (But 
this would be a short-medium-term solution until we have better tools.)

I also agree that tests should be in the final Full image/release, 
since that's what all the beginners will be using who can learn about 
how tests work.  (The SUnit gui could use a lot of improvement but 
that's a separate issue.)

I'm not sure if tests really need to be part of the final Basic 
image/release, although you can make a good case for that.  The Basic 
release includes just the development environment, and you could argue 
that tests are a part of that.  But mostly the only people using a 
final Basic image should be developers who want to strip down an image 
for a particular application, so they wouldn't need the tests and it 
would be one more thing they'd have to remove. (although they are very 
easy to strip out)

Long-term, we will eventually have a Minimal kernel image (perhaps 
based on Squat), which will obviously not contain tests. :-)

- Doug




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