[tahoe-dev] raise your hand if you have a patch for Tahoe-LAFS that needs tests

[Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn]

Folks:

As I mentioned on:
https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/68#comment:88 , I've
heard of several patches for Tahoe-LAFS that are complete enough to be
useful but can't be committed to trunk because they don't have tests.
This includes the multi-introducer patch by Faruq that killyourtv is
talking about on that ticket. If I recall correctly Faruq wrote a
basic test of subscribing to multiple introducers ¹, but we don't have
tests of other interesting cases, like what happens when one
introducer is connected and you subscribe to it and hear about a
server, and then that introducer goes offline and a different
introducer appears and you connect to it and hear a different (newer)
announcement about that server.

Anyway, I was wondering how many people know of patches that you would
like to see in Tahoe-LAFS trunk, and the reason it is not already
committed to trunk is that it doesn't have tests, and you're not sure
what sort of thing we expect in tests or how to write tests for
Twisted code, etc. You can find such patches by querying the trac for
the keyword 'test-needed': ².

If that describes you, let me know when you would be available for a
tutorial session on IRC where we pick one such patch and walk through
the process of writing tests for it. Brian Warner and David-Sarah
Hopwood are two of the best engineers in the universe, and they are
both (not coincidentally) two of the best unit-test-writers in the
universe, so I would find a time when at least one and hopefully both
of them would be willing to help.

(I would definitely recommend hanging out with these folks on IRC for
a couple of hours and working on a real patch for a real project. You
could pay some famous person or company big bucks for software
engineering training and not improve your skills as much.)

This coming weekend, when Andrew Miller and Zancas and I will be
hacking in person in Boulder, might be a good time to get on IRC and
help us write unit tests.

Regards,

Zooko

¹ https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/browser/ticket68-multi-introducer/src/allmydata/test/test_multi_introducers.py?rev=4685
² https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?status=!closed&keywords=~test-needed&order=priority