Re: [boost] Re: [Test] BOOST_TEST removed?

From: Douglas Gregor (dgregor_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-02-03 07:48:41

On Feb 2, 2005, at 11:22 PM, Gennadiy Rozental wrote:

>>> It's been deprecated *since the dawn of time*.  I planned post an
>>> announcement together with library update announcement.
>>
>> Still, developers like to avoid broken regression tests; they're
>> upsetting to developers at best.  A simple post with advance warning
>> that you were going to remove BOOST_TEST would have given everyone an
>> opportunity to prevent a large swath of red squares.
>
> What's wrong with red squares? Isn't it a basic paradigm of TDD? You 
> make
> change - you fix all the test cases that failed. Failing test cases is 
> your
> announcement that something needs to be done.

The problem is that a red square due to this change (that could have 
been avoided if you had given us warning) will mask other problems, so 
it slows development. For instance, John put in some type_traits 
changes that inevitably broke something, somewhere, but for him to find 
his errors in the sea of red will not be easy.

>  Anyway 3 years should've been
> enough to get rid of tools that were announced deprecated.

Sure. The problem is that the Test lib is one of those core libraries, 
like type_traits, where changes ripple through and can cause a lot of 
problems. We just need to know when deprecated bits are being removed, 
because it's very likely that some of us didn't even know they were 
deprecated until they were gone.

        Doug