Re: GNOME goal candidates

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On 1 March 2017 at 13:26, Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro gnome org> wrote:
> It sounds like most everyone else supports installed tests. OK, then.
>
> On Wed, 2017-03-01 at 10:22 +0000, Philip Withnall wrote:
> > I agree that developers need to be engaged with adding more unit
> > tests
> > and code coverage if such a goal is to be useful. I wonder if making
> > it
> > a goal would kick-start some people to do that? I don’t think we can
> > ever expect the majority of maintainers to care about (or have enough
> > time to care about) code coverage and unit testing — but GNOME goals
> > have been useful catalysts in the past. I guess a suitably well
> > publicised and tutorialised blog post would work just as well though.
>
> This is the other thing. The goals should be achievable, something we
> can look at in a year or two and say "all apps meet the goal" and close
> it, not a longstanding epic that stays open forever. The installed
> tests and coverage goals do not really qualify. Even though more tests
> are definitely desirable, I don't think it's reasonable to use the
> GNOME Goals project for this, even if it would be nice to see as many
> projects as possible adopting it.
>
> Maybe I am being too negative here. It does seem odd to say that doing
> something desirable should not be a goal. But a longstanding pie-in-
> the-sky project is very different from existing goals. Switching to
> g_timeout_add_seconds() or adding a GtkHeaderBar are quick tasks that
> all apps should be able to accomplish easily. Adding a comprehensive
> testsuite, not so much. And adding just one or two installed tests,
> while a good starting point, is not very useful on its own.

At some point, Gnome Goals become "best practices for GNOME projects"
— especially because new projects should conform to these goals by
default.

I'm all for taking all the present and past GNOME Goals pages on the
wiki and turning them into "Best Practices for GNOME projects" — where
applicable. Additionally, every cycle we can evaluate where we are on
the completion of every goal, and if the completion rate passes a
certain threshold we simply close the goal and move the page to the
"best practices" section.

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
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[@] ebassi [@gmail.com]