Re: ert.el --- Emacs Lisp Regression Testing

[Richard Stallman]

ert.el looks very useful.  Would you like to contribute it to Emacs?

One of the things that has held us back from setting up a test suite
in the past is that only a minority of Emacs bugs concern Lisp progrmming.
Most Emacs bugs involve keyboard commands and/or redisplay.

It occurs to me that M-x term could be used to test for redisplay.
The idea is that you run a sub-Emacs, send it commands, and check what
it displayed (because what it displayed is now in a buffer).

It would be terribly slow to do this starting a new sub-Emacs for each
test.  So the test framework ought to be designed to do many such tests
with the same sub-Emacs, clearing out whatever is necessary each time.

I think that an extension to ert.el, for sub-Emacs testing, might make
it easy to define those tests, much as ert.el makes it easy to define
tests of Lisp execution.

Interested?