[vlc-devel] ALPN support on Apple platforms

[Wilawar]

> > 4) Ignore the failing test and just do nothing until someone from
> > securetransport or gnutls adds support for the missing pieces. - I think
> > this is not an option as well, mainly because:
> >   - We should not have always failing tests because a feature is not
> > implemented
> 
> I still totally disagree. And that statement is essentially rejecting the very 
> premise of test-driven development. So I dare extrapolate that a lot of other 
> people in the software industry disagree with you on this.
> 
> A test should fail if the implementation is not working as it is supposed to. 
> It is irrelevant if the failure is caused by a regression, a latent bug, a 
> nondeterministic implementation or an incomplete implementation or a missing 
> implementation. In all cases, removing or disabling the test case amounts to 
> shooting the messenger.

I’m with David on this. Your remark about rejecting test-driven development is
not relevant here, essentially a strawman, as I don’t believe the continuous
builds are geared towards supporting this way of programming; marking these
test failures as known would probably help removing their distraction, yet I
don’t think your CI server has such an option (nor did I check if it has).

David argued for adapting expectations in the third possibility (nr. 3) he lined out
and I don’t think this amounts to plainly shooting the messenger. If there is a
known and accepted bug, for which it is also known that it’s unlikely that its
status will change soon, it really doesn’t make any sense whatsoever to continue
testing for the failure. The test case should be re-enabled once patches land that
are supposed to fix this problem.

Test-driven development is one approach one could choose to take to fix this,
albait I’d run the failing tests on the machine used for development in this case.

> But disabling a failing test to see the results of the following tests seems 
> totally backward to me.
It doesn’t strike me as backwards, rather as stupid having to do it, but that’s not
because of user error but because, apparently, the tooling is apparently the
problem, just as it can be necessary to fix some errors first before compilers
(particularly those for languages such as C++ that are hard to parse correctly)
would display the remaining ones. Not nice having to do that, but required to
make it work. Only that in this case, it ought to be simpler to get more detailed
reports from the tools.


Well, so much from a bystander who is cutting down some of the vlc-devel backlog
that has accumulated on his mail account and has never heard of ALPN before. :)

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