Re: [Module-build-general] sorting tests

[Ken W. <ke...@ma...>]

On Wednesday, August 28, 2002, at 02:29 AM, David Wheeler wrote:

> On Tuesday, August 27, 2002, at 02:28  AM, Ken Williams wrote:
>
>> Yeah, I agree that TEST_FILES is handy, and some kind of 
>> selector mechanism like that should be in M::B.  Not sure what 
>> the syntax should look like yet.  Internally, it should just 
>> generate a list of files to run.
>
> While I think that this is a decent feature, I think that 
> really we should discourage people from ordering their tests. 
> In an ideal testing environment, tests won't have dependencies 
> on each other, and order shouldn't matter. The docs ought to 
> say that, IMO, and point to some decent documentation or 
> tutorial on unit testing.

Yeah, I agree.  That sounds like a reasonable approach.

IMO, the main reason for having something like TEST_FILES is so 
you can only execute a single test.  That's often a big 
time-saver when tracking down a bug.


>
> That said, I've been known to name tests so that they execute 
> in a certain order, myself. :-\

Yeah, but I usually do it just in a "simple-to-complicated" 
ordering, or in a "this-helps-me-remember" ordering.  I've yet 
to actually create order dependencies between tests, at least 
not on purpose. =)

  -Ken