Hi!
I don't agree, or I don't understand, "Test Plan:" is fantastic and I've wanted it in commit messages for years. Thinking about how to test is essential to writing good code, and a reminder to express your thought
I agree completely. I am in no way against having "Test plan". What I am against - and in this instance as in others - is replacing person's judgement with a mechanism, and forcing to crate a fake "test plan" where one doesn't make sense or can not be provided.
If someone writes "Test Plan: whatever", they'll get -1s until they respect reviewers enough to write "Test Plan: trivial untested fix in an area that lacks tests".
Sometimes they would. Sometimes it's fixing "teh" in the README, and writing an essay about how this does not need testing is redundant. Everybody understand why it doesn't need testing - so filling in mandatory fields would be time spent not doing something productive but working around the system that was set up wrong. Admittedly, it would be a small time, but this things add up. And, on more principled direction, it just should not happen if we can avoid it. We can solve it very easily - just not make that field mandatory. As you correctly explained, if that fix does need the test, it'll be -1-ed until it has the tests, and this system seems to be working so far. I think placing trust in sound judgement of the developers is the best.
In the last week my instance crashed on two checkins that were +2'd but never run; both useful improvements to MediaWiki-Vagrant roles that looked completely legit. I appreciate people writing needed code and others
That will always happen. There's no way to prevent it completely. Any setup that promises this will never happen again is just a delusion - every software has bugs, and sooner or later you'll encounter one of them. That could also happen with "Test plan" - nobody guaranteed it wouldn't say "everything fine", and being +2ed, and still break down.
reviewing it promptly, but typing: "Test Plan: I didn't test this patch at
That I have no objections to.