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Thank you LWNThank you LWNPosted Dec 15, 2010 10:17 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185)In reply to: Thank you LWN by rvfh Parent article: Behind the KOffice split
Thomas complained that a long-standing community member who had been helping a summer of code student with the tables feature had not delivered the exact set of unittests he had requested and refused all further contributions from that community member after he joined KO GmbH. Despite being the only free software suite that actually has a set of unittests (with about 25% code coverage) there are problems with the architecture Thomas designed for the text editing feature that make writing unittests in this particular area very hard or even impossible, so it was a convenient tool for him to make people's work impossible. (And there's not just unittests, we have a set of over 3000 documents that are tested after every commit. This set was provided by Nokia, by the way.) As for breaking stuff... Well, I'm sure that happened. Basically, KWord's layout engine is not just very complicated, it's also really brittle and buggy. Basically, unmaintainable spaghetti code, so everyone who touches it breaks stuff, including Thomas. And even if it were great, where work is being done, stuff breaks.
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Thank you LWN Posted Dec 16, 2010 15:27 UTC (Thu) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
> we have a set of over 3000 documents that are tested after every commit
Does LibreOffice also test against that set of documents?
Thank you LWN Posted Dec 20, 2010 19:28 UTC (Mon) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
> Despite being the only free software suite that actually has a set of unittests
Do you mean the only free software office productivity suite? If so, what are the candidates? OpenOffice, KOffice and .. is there another entrant?
I'm not mocking, I just don't really know what's being implied here. If the statement is essentially "we don't have full coverage and we'd like more, but OpenOffice has none", I find that pretty informative, if somehow personally unsurprising.
Read flatly, it seems to imply that you're the only free software suite of any sort that has unit tests (not sure what comprises a suite.)
Tried Monkey Testing? Posted Dec 29, 2010 16:26 UTC (Wed) by gmatht (guest, #58961) [Link]
I was just wondering if you had tried monkey testing. Dumb monkey tests only find crash/abort type bugs, but that is certainly good start. I wrote a script to perform Monkey tests and related tasks: spamming millions of keypresses, detecting crashes, finding minimal recipes to reproduce the crash, automatically finding the changeset that introduced the crash and so on. At the moment I've mostly used it on LyX (on which is has found about 60 bugs), but I am making it more general, and it has found a bug in abiword.
http://blogs.tucs.org.au/frsi/programme/#mccabe
My goal is to get it so that you can just point it at any project and press go. It is still rather finicky at the moment however.
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