Hi, I originally came across suckless about six years ago when I was looking at IRC clients and thus discovered ii. Since then I have periodically updated myself on suckless happenings and have always held the software in high regard. But I had never thought to contribute anything because I have pretty much never written C.
I have been thinking about how I might contribute without learning a lot of C, and writing automated tests seems like a good thing. Many of the tools could be tested in sh instead, and this might even be preferable in some cases. And I probably can write decent tests in C without being particularly good at C because the test cases can be relatively straightforward. Also, the intended behaviors of suckless programs are usually obvious because they are so simple and well documented, so I think I understand them well enough to write appropriate tests. 1. Tell me if you would like to see tests for any particular project that you work on, and I might eventually write them. 2. Have you previously considered having someone who knows very little C write tests for suckless programs? Tom Postscript: I might also not write tests for any particular project. Because suckless programs are so simple in both implementation and interface, I suspect that maintaining a test suite would often provide little benefit compared to informal documentation that discusses the intended behavior of the program and mentions edge cases; I suspect that a program would need to meet at least one of the following criteria in order for automated testing to be very helpful. 1. The user interface is complex. 2. Supporting different environments is a large concern. 3. People have managed to break already-documented things by accident in patches. I even have my doubts that testing would be that helpful here, though, because of what I see in sbase. I consider sbase to have a relatively complex user interface, but it is quite developed and lacks automated tests; it has apparently done fine without automated tests.
