you don't need to learn a lot of C, C is rather small. didn't read further than that, sorry.
On 4/29/16, Thomas Levine <_...@thomaslevine.com> wrote: > Hi, > > I originally came across suckless about six years ago when I was looking > at IRC clients and thus discovered ii. Since then I have periodically > updated myself on suckless happenings and have always held the software > in high regard. But I had never thought to contribute anything because > I have pretty much never written C. > > I have been thinking about how I might contribute without learning a lot > of C, and writing automated tests seems like a good thing. Many of the > tools could be tested in sh instead, and this might even be preferable > in some cases. And I probably can write decent tests in C without being > particularly good at C because the test cases can be relatively > straightforward. Also, the intended behaviors of suckless programs are > usually obvious because they are so simple and well documented, so I > think I understand them well enough to write appropriate tests. > > 1. Tell me if you would like to see tests for any particular > project that you work on, and I might eventually write them. > 2. Have you previously considered having someone who knows very > little C write tests for suckless programs? > > Tom > > Postscript: I might also not write tests for any particular project. > Because suckless programs are so simple in both implementation and > interface, I suspect that maintaining a test suite would often provide > little benefit compared to informal documentation that discusses the > intended behavior of the program and mentions edge cases; I suspect that > a program would need to meet at least one of the following criteria in > order for automated testing to be very helpful. > > 1. The user interface is complex. > 2. Supporting different environments is a large concern. > 3. People have managed to break already-documented things by accident > in patches. > > I even have my doubts that testing would be that helpful here, though, > because of what I see in sbase. I consider sbase to have a relatively > complex user interface, but it is quite developed and lacks automated > tests; it has apparently done fine without automated tests. > >
