Having the https://github.com/r-devel/r-svn repository has been great for making the process of testing patches and reading the codebase so much easier.
Recently @sasutils and I were working on this patch for the foreign package.
https://bugs.r-project.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19012
Since it is a rewrite of very old code (basically a complete refactoring) we wanted to write tests. But there really is no testing framework. I was wondering if it would be a good project (totally separate from directly contributing to the core itself) to start to develop a testing infrastructure for the base and recommended packages. It creates a lot of worry that things will break in unexpected ways. I think currently the only really extensive test is when running changes against all of CRAN and seeing what builds fail there. It would be great to be able to run a set of tests just on the r base distribution.
I find that writing tests really helps me to understand a codebase, and I could definitely see myself working on that.
Having the https://github.com/r-devel/r-svn repository has been great for making the process of testing patches and reading the codebase so much easier.
Recently @sasutils and I were working on this patch for the foreign package.
https://bugs.r-project.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19012
Since it is a rewrite of very old code (basically a complete refactoring) we wanted to write tests. But there really is no testing framework. I was wondering if it would be a good project (totally separate from directly contributing to the core itself) to start to develop a testing infrastructure for the base and recommended packages. It creates a lot of worry that things will break in unexpected ways. I think currently the only really extensive test is when running changes against all of CRAN and seeing what builds fail there. It would be great to be able to run a set of tests just on the r base distribution.
I find that writing tests really helps me to understand a codebase, and I could definitely see myself working on that.