Re: [Gnu-arch-users] more on the merge-fest

[Andrew Suffield]

On Tue, Nov 25, 2003 at 07:25:05PM -0800, Samuel A. Falvo II wrote:
> On Tuesday 25 November 2003 06:10 pm, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> > I've never seen tests form an adequete substitute for gdb. Usually
> > they just tell you that you need to break out gdb and figure out what
> > the hell happened.
> 
> Then your tests aren't fine grained enough.

Uhh, no. It's got absolutely nothing to do with the granularity of the
tests. It's entirely to do with the proximity of the cause and effect.

If cause and effect are separated by 500 lines of code, then no amount
of testing in 20-line chunks is going to demonstrate the problem.

Tests just find problems. They don't (and can't) indicate their
cause. At best you can hope to spot it by inspection, which only
happens when a) the cause is nearby, and b) you're lucky.

-- 
  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
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