--- On Thu, 7/9/09, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
Hell, we barely have unit tests for Mediawiki itself, much less the many many extensions in SVN. I can't think of a single one, offhand.
FWIW, handling updates between versions is a mess. There are two accepted and documented ways to apply an extension's schema updates. There needs to be one, period. There also needs to be a cleaner Update interface so things like this can be handled more cleanly.
It's nice and great to talk about automated regression testing of the software, but in reality there is no clean way to do it right now. I really admire Gerard and Kim's work on this, but it's really a hack on top of a system that should support this stuff natively.
Regression testing should be automatic, the test cases should be standardized, and extensions should have an easy way to add their own tests to the core set of them. None of these are currently the case. There's a bug open about running parserTests and/or test cases in CodeReview so we can easily and verifiably track regressions in the software. Can't do that until the system makes some sense to begin with :)
-Chad
Hmm. Not the perfect situation :D . But, as a manager once told me, baby steps, Dan, baby steps. So, I think an informal plan to incrementally improve testing of Mediawiki would be useful. One idea is to broadcast an appeal for testing engineers to help rectify the situation. I am retired myself and I suspect there are bunch of retired testing engineers out there that might be willing to help. Of course, figuring out how to reach them is the main problem.
Dan