[mercury-users] Mercury Anarchive proposal

[Ondrej Bojar]

Tom Breton (Tehom) wrote:
>> Julian Fondren wrote:
>>> Why is this ideal?  The most amazingly test-driven project I've
>>> seen, the Perl6-in-Haskell Pugs project, -needs- failing tests.
>> A test that should fail is easily changed to a test that must not fail.
> I doubt that's what he meant.  Test-driven development writes the tests
> first, then changes the code.  Every feature begins as a failing test.  If
> you enforce no failing tests, it means no new features or no test-driven
> development.
> 
> That said, IMO there is a place for mature code that can be expected to
> pass all its existing tests.

Ah! Sure! I understand and surely agree to this way of using tests. So for 
Julian, please note that my original wording was:

          # ideally, the pre-commit validation would not allow committing if
          # any package fails some of the tests after your change that were
          # successful before your change

In other words, it is fine to add a brand new failing test as it is fine to 
change a failing test without actually fixing it. (There is a risk of 
malicious behaviour of people with non-functioning environment/different 
platform. But I hope people will not modify and commit code they were not able 
to run before and are not able to run now.)

O.

-- 
Ondrej Bojar (mailto:obo at cuni.cz / bojar at ufal.mff.cuni.cz)
http://www.cuni.cz/~obo
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