Re: burden of maintainance

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Helmut Eller <address@hidden>
> Date: Fri, 02 Oct 2015 09:51:43 +0200
> 
> On Thu, Oct 01 2015, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> > Suggestions for how to improve our test suite without alienating
> > potential contributors are welcome.
> 
> For a start, fix bug#16853.

Why that particular bug?  We have lots of open bugs; what's special
about that one.

> Second, make it easy to run the test suite in non-batch mode

It's already possible, I do that quite a lot.  What doesn't work for
you?

> as it's impossible to test display related issues in batch mode
> alone.  Perhaps use Screen or Xvfb to run the display code without
> physically displaying anything.

These are X- and Unix-specific, AFAIK.  And even on those systems,
we'll need a lot of infrastructure built on top of that, before it
will be reasonably practical to write display-related tests.  I hope
someone will volunteer to do that.

In any case, the problem is not with actually displaying something,
the problem is how to compare that with some "expected results".
(Assuming you were talking about testing the display engine.)