Re: testing framework and package.el

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Christian Ohler writes:

 > IIUC, this design requires developers who want to add features and write 
 > tests for them to check out two different bzr branches and submit two 
 > different patches.

Currently, yes.  With nested branches, the checkout will be implicit.

 > Isn't that a rather high bar that will be inconvenient for
 > developers and discourage them from writing tests?

In my experience, people who actually write tests (unless there's a
firm requirement that tests be submitted before committing) are hard
to discourage.  The only job programmers like less than writing tests
is writing docs. :-)

The real problem is getting those tests backported.

 > As an alternative that avoids this problem, we could maintain the tests 
 > in Emacs trunk, but our makefiles could have a test_src variable that 
 > defaults to tests, and that we can set to ../trunk/tests when running 
 > tests in the emacs-23 directory in Stephen's layout.

Which still requires serious developers to have multiple checkouts.