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2 points by akkartik 2269 days ago | link | parent

I wasn't saying there'd be a reduced need for tests. It's hard for me to see how adding CI would reduce the need for tests. I'm worried that people will say this stupid CI keeps failing, so "best practice" is to not write tests. (The way that package managers don't enforce major versions, so "best practice" has evolved to be always pinning.)

Unnecessary tests are an absolutely valid problem, but independent :)



2 points by shader 2267 days ago | link

By "reduced need for tests" I didn't mean that the absolute number of tests would decline, but rather the need and incentives for the development team to write the tests themselves. Since they have the ecosystem providing tests for them, they don't need to make as many themselves. At least, that's how I understood the discussion.

So yes, if the package manager only enforced the tests you include in your package it would incorrectly discourage including tests. But if it enforces tests that _other_ people provide, you have no way around it. The only problem is how to handle bad tests submitted by other people. Maybe only enforce tests that passed on a previous version but fail on the current candidate?

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1 point by akkartik 2266 days ago | link

Ooh, that's another novel idea I hadn't considered. I don't know how I feel about others being able to add to my automated test suite, though. Would one of my users be able to delete tests that another wrote? If they only have create privileges, not update, how would they modify tests? Who has the modification privileges?

These are whole new vistas, and it seems fun to think through various scenarios.

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2 points by shader 2264 days ago | link

It's not really the same as others being able to add tests to your automated suite. Rather, they add tests to their own package, and then the CI tool collects all tests indirectly dependent on your library into a virtual suite. Those tests are written to test their code, and only indirectly test yours. If a version of their package passes all of their tests with a previous version of your code, but the atomic change to the latest version of your code causes their test to fail, the failure was presumably caused by that change. The tests will probably have to be run multiple times to eliminate non-determinism.

It's still possible that someone writes code that depends on "features" that you consider to be bugs, or a pathologically sensitive test, so there may need to be some ability as the maintainer to flag tests as poor or unhelpful so they can be ignored in the future. Hopefully the requirement that the test pass the previous version to be considered is sufficient to cover most faulty tests though.

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1 point by akkartik 2263 days ago | link

Yes, this was kinda what I had in mind when I talked about an open source app store. Make it easy for libraries to be aware of how they're used.

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2 points by shader 2260 days ago | link

It doesn't look like it would be too hard to start building such a system on top of Github; they provide an api for seaching for repos by language.

We could potentially build it first for Arc, which would be pretty small and simple, but also provide the package manager we've always wanted :P

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