[RFC] Multipart support for _urllib_

[Michael Ellerman]

On 6/21/06, Martin Pool <mbp at canonical.com> wrote:
> On 21 Jun 2006, Michael Ellerman <michael at ellerman.id.au> wrote:
> > On 6/21/06, Martin Pool <mbp at canonical.com> wrote:
>
> > >> Well, that shouldn't be too bad. How much testing do you want in place
> > >> before it is considered worthy of merging? (I would like to get some
> > >> testing as well, but I have some other major focuses this week, and
> > >> would like to see it merged soonish).
> > >
> > >Well, what I would *really* like is to encourage bzr developers to get
> > >to into the habit of test-driven development; writing things as you go
> > >along.  One thing I've learnt is that if you leave tests until later it
> > >just gets harder to add them.
> >
> > Oh but I did use TDD, the test was "can I branch bzr.dev" ;)
>
> Right!  So the thing is to ask "now, rather than making this a once-off
> manual test, how can I make it into a reproducible test."  There is a
> knack to it which I am still learning, and in some cases the
> infrastructure is all there, but when it does work it pays off well.
>
> > Point taken, and I actually did look into writing tests first, but I
> > really don't grok the testing infrastructure very well, and then
> > people started getting impatient so I just got it working. I don't
> > expect you to merge it without tests.
>
> Well, I don't want to have it languish unmerged and untested either.  So
> what can we do to help you grok the infrastructure or the right style of
> test to write?  (Maybe something to go into HACKING?)

Sure. I'm upgrading my folks computer to dapper tonight, which should
give me a few hours of sitting around watching apt-get, so I should be
able to at least get started on some tests.

Well in general the testing stuff is great, so I don't want to sound
like I'm whinging. But ..

I guess the first hurdle is working out _where_ to put the test, and
if there's already a test for the code you're looking at. AFAICT
there's no systematic linkage between tests and the code that's being
tested. That would help, eg. if every method had a comment that said
"tested by bzrlib/tests/test_foo.py:TestWhatever.test_something()".
Although I guess in practice it's not always clear, and for blackbox
tests you actually don't really care what gets tested, jus t that it
_works_.

Secondly there's no documentation (AFAIK) on how best to write the
actual tests. It's reasonably easy to work out by cribbing from other
tests, but sometimes it's not clear.

cheers