Re: GNOME goal candidates

[Simon McVittie <simon mcvittie collabora co uk>]

On Wed, 01 Mar 2017 at 10:22:56 +0000, Philip Withnall wrote:
>  • installed-tests allows reverse-dependency testing: find test
> failures from new versions of libraries your project depends on,
> without having to rebuild your project (useful in a CI environment)

This is particularly interesting because if one of your rdeps has
unintentionally broken ABI, rebuilding your project would hide that error.
GNOME mostly dodges this bullet because it's mostly C and what is ABI in
C is relatively well-understood, but it matters a lot for C++.

>  • Allows for integration tests as well as just unit tests

I think this is quite a key thing too - some tests (integration tests and
those that must run with root privileges or specific third-party bits)
only make sense as installed-tests, some tests (unit tests that exercise
internals) only make sense as build-time tests, and many tests (black-box
unit tests that only use public APIs) can work fine both ways.

    S