geda-developers team mailing list archive

[Dan McMahill <dan@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2/5/2015 9:51 PM, Andrew Poelstra wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
>
> Peter C emailed me recently about some weird pcb-printf behaviour he's seeing
> with some specifiers, and in my five minute investigation I also noticed that
>
>    unit_to_coord (get_unit_struct ("mm"), 1.0)
>
> returns 999999, which is an off-by-one error. This is because unit_to_coord
> passes through to 1/coord_to_unit instead of doing its own computation.
>
>
> I'm sure there's lots of stuff like this that are basically trivial to catch,
> but today we're not catching them because we have no unit tests.

There are some tests on the exporters but they are fairly limited (says 
one who is hopelessly out of date with the current state of things).

> I discovered that GLib supports unit testing, as described at
>
> https://developer.gnome.org/glib/stable/glib-Testing.html
>
> so we can add unit tests with no new dependencies.
>
>
> I've pushed 86ba8ca which adds a single test and changes `make check` to
> run it. This commit also fixes the aforementioned off-by-one bug, since
> this was a small fix, got the new testsuite into a passing state, and
> didn't cause any regressions to fail.
>
> Please let me know if there are comments or concerns about any of this.
>
>
> To unit test a file:
>    1. Add it to TEST_SRCS in src/Makefile.am
>
>    2. In the file, add
>
>      #ifdef PCB_UNIT_TEST
>         /* Function to call g_test_add_func() on following functions */
>         /* Actual unit test functions */
>      #endif PCB_UNIT_TEST
>
>    3. In src/main-test.c add a call to the first function from step 2.
>
> See what I've done with pcb-printf.c for an example. If this seems
> reasonable I'll add these steps to the README.

I am not really enough up to speed to comment on if this is a good way 
to implement it but I've seen huge benefits of better automated testing 
in other places.  I'm all for whatever it takes to get PCB to that state 
(a more testable/verifiable one).

Thanks for looking into this.
-Dan