Re: test suite progress

On Tue, 24 Apr 2001, Sam TH wrote:

> > Every time a subcommand could potentially change something on
> > disk, we need to inspect the disk. Specifically, this means:
> >
> > * user-data: we need to make sure the working copy has
> > exactly the tree-structure we expect, and each file has
> > exactly the contents we expect. We also need to look at
> > all user-specified properties.
>
> Question here: how do we want to compare file contents? I see two
> options -
>
> 1. Use cmp.cmp().
> + Exact comparison.
> - Can't be stored in the tree structure.
> - Potentially slow.
>
> 2. Use md5sums.
> + Faster.
> + Can be stored in tree.
> - Could be wrong.
>
> Personally, I prefer the latter, since it allows us to maintain my tree
> work. If people have strong feelings about the correcness issue, I would
> suggest using md5sums for most things, and then having seperate tests
> which use cmp() for extra accuracy.

Personally, I'd go for the first version. When speaking test scripts in
general.

Not because the the correctness issue, as I belive md5 is correct enough, but
for being able to do 'diff file1 file2' (or possibly cmp when doing true
binary operations) to get a grip of what did get wrong and how it was
expected to look like.

With an md5 digest, all you know is that it is wrong, but not how wrong.

-- 
      Daniel Stenberg - http://daniel.haxx.se - +46-705-44 31 77
   ech`echo xiun|tr nu oc|sed 'sx\([sx]\)\([xoi]\)xo un\2\1 is xg'`ol