Re: address@hidden: Re: Possible help with stable Emacsreleases.]

[Lennart Borgman]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Eli Zaretskii" <address@hidden>

: > I'll also in favour of test cases we can replay every time we
: > add new patches. Since emacs is able to run in batch, there is
: > no reason no to do so.
:
: Alas, there's no test suite for Emacs.  We discussed this in the past,
: so you can find in the archives why it is difficult to come up with
: such a test suite (display testing is one problem).

Just for the record: There seem to something coming on the GUI side for
testing. The page
http://www.testdriven.com/modules/mylinks/viewcat.php?cid=13 contains two
tools that could be used: Autolt (GPL) and X11::GUITest (GPL). As far as I
can see Autolt is only for Windows platforms and X11::GUITest is in an early
beta stage.

I guess testing on MS Windows has some drawbacks. However it could also be a
good idea since many things are made available on the screen. (This has been
part of MS investment in accessability.) I don't have any idea how the state
of these things are on X, but I guess there is something similar since
X11::GUITest is beeing written. Anyway tests could be written in layers to
hide the dependency of the exact tool used. (But this would perhaps make it
slow, beeing quite contrary to the idea of unit tests.)

- Lennart