[ruby-core:67355] Re: Future of test suites for Ruby

Charles Oliver Nutter <[e-mail]> wrote:
> * Begin an effort to bring missing tests from RubySpec into MRI's
> suite and to clean up and improve MRI's suite. Abandon RubySpec at
> some point.

This is ideal (but also a lot of effort).  Other Ruby implementations
ought to be able to use MRI's test suite easily.

> I don't like the idea of abandoning RubySpec, since it has many
> valuable features.

Valuable features outside of specs themselves?  Can you elaborate?

Like akr, I prefer a smaller test library with fewer surprises to ease
debugging.  One recent example was Bug #10685 where you and Chris both
had trouble reproducing the test as a standalone case.

> * Take over RubySpec as a fork and begin to maintain it as a secondary
> suite for MRI. Encourage contributors and committers to write specs
> rather than tests.
> 
> I think this is possible. The barrier to contributing to RubySpec is
> much lower if we're maintaining a fork of it, and I think that
> eliminates many obstacles. I also feel like the future needs to be in
> either RubySpec or a much cleaner version of MRI's suite, and there's
> less work to start using the former now.

I wouldn't mind this, except there's a major barrier to some folks
(OK, perhaps I'm the only one :<):

    Contributing to RubySpec requires an account and accepting a
    Terms-of-Service on a proprietary service provider.

    We use Ruby freely without accepting any ToS from for-profit
    company; so I hope we may all contribute without jumping through
    that hoop as well.