unit testing [was Re: when emacs 22.1 release will ready?]

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

address@hidden writes:

 > The problem is of course to get developers interested in creating
 > unit-test.

XEmacs has a unit-test framework, comprising about 100,000 individual
tests, which is probably 500 to 1,000 features being tested.  Not
much, but much better than nothing.

You'd have to check with rms / FSF legal dept, but we do have CVS
commit records and ChangeLogs, so authorship should be easy to
establish with high accuracy.  The framework itself probably has at
most 5 authors, of whom two surely have assignments on file.  Tests
themselves are mostly single-author and independent of each other, so
you can take only the well-documented and assigned ones.  FSF legal
would possibly want further documentation, but this might be easier to
get than to write a framework and tests from scratch, and would have
the advantage that (where papers are available) tests written for
XEmacs and SXEmacs would "just work."

Any Lisp coder can write simple tests in a couple of minutes.