Re: How you can help

[Bernt Hansen <bernt@norang.ca>]

Ben Alexander <bva@alexanderonline.org> writes:

> Sebastian Rose wrote:
>>  5. I also think of little packages for testing parts of org.
>
> I'm curious if you or someone else has any ideas for writing automated
> tests for org-mode.  I haven't the foggiest idea how someone would
> write a test for the parts of org that control what is displayed on
> the screen.  I mean, when the bug is 'it doesn't look right' how can
> you tell?
>
> Perhaps the git repository should have a small collection of small
> org- 
> mode files that reproduce certain bugs?  If there were some examples
> of how to create such a test, then perhaps bug reporters would find it
> much easier to create them.
>
> I do see some confusing issues due to different configuration files.
> So creating a test file might involve making sure org-mode doesn't
> read any configuration (how do you do that?) and possible asking org- 
> mode to extract all the configuration variables it has right now and
> dump them into a test file (...and how do you do that?)

Running a minimal emacs should suppress custom config files:
         emacs -q -l yourtest.el

Some kind of regression testing framework would be awesome.  Org-mode is
large enough that this is almost a necessity to keep things stable and
bug-free.

Maybe something can be put together from the git testing framework and
use of emacs -batch to process test org files and verify the output is
as expected (with diff or some other tool).

-Bernt