Gathering comprehensive SRFI test suites in one place
Lassi Kortela 26 Jan 2020 15:12 UTC
I've been looking at the test suites for many SRFIs in the last few
months, and have been thinking it would be really useful to have
up-to-date tests for all SRFIs gathered in one Git repo.
While it's great that the original sample implementations have tests:
- Some don't have any.
- Particular Scheme implementations sometimes do more comprehensive
tests of a particular SRFI than what its sample implementation does.
- Test suites have bugs and omissions which are later fixed in some
(but not all) copies of the test suite. Fixing them in the sample
implementation requires(?) the approval of the SRFI's author, who
may not be easy to reach. Fixing them only in a particular Scheme
implementation's native test suite does not help other
implementations.
- Several different unit test frameworks are used, and since there
is no universally available framework, some SRFIs tests are written
using a custom lightweight framework. It would be nice to have a
collection of tests for different SRFIs all using the same framework.
This would make it easy for people to run and fix tests and submit
patches since there's no need to learn an unfamiliar framework.
I have a very modest start here:
<https://github.com/srfi-explorations/srfi-test>. Will be covering more
SRFIs soon. Comments and help are very welcome. If such a test suite is
a bad idea for some reason, please let me know.