documentable unittest

[H. S. Teoh]

On Fri, Feb 08, 2013 at 02:06:04AM +0100, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
> On 2/8/13, H. S. Teoh <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
> > http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=9475
> >
> > Sorry for being such a bugbear, ;-) but I really want to see this
> > feature succeed!
> 
> This is why we desperately need a way for users to test out new
> features before they're pushed to master. Nobody noticed any of these
> bugs even though the pull has been opened for a while now.

Maybe feature branches are what we need for this?

Also, how many people actually check out code from pull requests to test
them? I've confess I haven't been, I just look at the diffs and evaluate
them.  It's a lot of trouble to checkout an entire DMD + druntime +
Phobos suite from a forked repos, along with setting things up so that
the right version of DMD gets called when compiling your test, DMD finds
the correct versions of stuff, etc., all just to try out a single pull
request.

Having new features immediately available (even in half-baked,
incomplete, limping state) in a branch on the official repos will help a
lot -- then one could just 'git checkout' the branch, rebuild, and run
tests. If the feature proves to be unworkable, the branch can just be
left unmerged (or deleted), and by the time it merges into master, it
would hopefully have been sanity-tested enough that there are no big
embarrassing problems left.

It may even be possible to have an autobuilder build the branch, and put
it up as one of the compilers you can select on the current dpaste site.
Then people could even test the branch online just by typing code and
selecting the branch! How cool would that be??


T

-- 
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