I have fixed 8 bugs (some fairly trivial) in /phase3/t/ so all of the tests in /t/inc/ now
work. I have opened a bug ticket (20112) and attached a patch that fixes the bugs. I have
not fixed problems with the tests in /t/maint/ because: 1) they seem to test OS
functionality, not the MW software, and 2) they are written in PERL not PHP and my IDE
(Netbeans 6.7.1) doesn't support PERL. Perhaps someone who has an IDE with PERL
support will develop an interest in fixing them.
This completes the task Brion asked me to take on. What happens next is up to the
developer community. I have some ideas about test harness architecture (not radical ideas,
but more than just fixing dings in the software) that I will run up the flag pole in
subsequent posts. So far, only a few have responded to my posts (admittedly, some were a
bit silly, such as the one asking where $wgLocalisationCacheConf is defined), but it seems
few developers are interested in MW QA. Well, that isn't exactly unusual. Features are
always more interesting that code stability. But, the history of software is littered with
products possessing really neat features that eventually failed because developers did not
take care of quality.
Enough preaching.