Re: [Libreoffice] comprehensive binfilter tests?

On Mon, 2011-09-26 at 10:23 +0200, Stephan Bergmann wrote:
> With the apparently somewhat semi-automatic code clean-up/removal in 
> binfilter (removing dead code, noticing compiler warnings about thus 
> newly unused variables, thus removing more dead code, ...), I wonder 
> whether this does not introduce regressions.

        Probably it does; all code change has that potential :-) but this
should -never- stop us doing it. Arguably code that has the highest rate
of change coupled with people working on and caring about it also has
the best quality, certainly after a few minor point releases.

        The LibreOffice approach has been to encourage people to change the
code, and fix any knock-on problems later. True, some parts of the code
are horribly fragile - but this is a great way of identifying and
hardening /  fixing those pieces. The OpenOffice approach of
discouraging code change was IMHO a short-sighted fast-track to
obscurity, discouraging the volunteer developers crucial to progress
from contributing.

>   Do we have some comprehensive test suite for binfilter?

        No. Having said that, we don't have a -comprehensive- test suite for
other, more useful code that people are actively using day by day; say
the ODF import / export support ;-) or the Microsoft binary / OOXML
filters, all of which are also under active development.

        I imagine that something useful for testing binfilter's import (we
killed export) may be quite simple - particularly since the style /
content of the ODF it produces is expected to never change again :-)
Potentially we could have a during-build unit-test modelled on the sc/
filters-test that hooked the XML out of the binfilter filter directly
[without going through a nasty re-save-as-ODF that'd introduce regular
constant change] that would be robust, cause ~no false positives and be
rather helpful. At least the extra confidence might help accelerate the
rate of change and boldness with which it is made there.

        Is that what you were thinking ? :-)

        Regards,

                Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks@suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot