On Tue, Jun 16, 2026 at 11:16 AM Aleksander Alekseev <[email protected]> wrote: > > > I'm not super attracted to the idea of back-patching a whole new test > > framework into stable branches. But the alternatives are not pretty > > either --- eg, who will want to write a python test and then translate > > it to perl for the back branches? > > That's a fair concern. It seems to me that back-patching TAP tests > doesn't happen too often. Also modern LLM agents should be quite good > at it.
I've written a few backpatches, and actually writing a TAP test for those is pretty common because you are fixing a bug and often one that is hard to reproduce (or it would get caught earlier) and only testable in TAP. However, I always had to write variants for each branch that were different enough for different reasons that I wouldn't have minded writing it in a different framework -- especially when the initial draft version could be written by an LLM. I think doing this is far preferable to backporting the test framework -- which will likely be a quite active development area and thus itself require lots of backpatches. That sounds like a good way to make everyone hate the new test framework. Now, granted, I have only averaged a couple backpatches a year, so those more prolific authors may feel different. - Melanie
