Re: UEFI Plugfest 2013 -- New Orleans

From: James Bottomley
Date: Mon Aug 19 2013 - 13:38:52 EST


On Mon, 2013-08-19 at 18:21 +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 10:02:55AM -0700, James Bottomley wrote:
>
> > The object of having a test suite conform to the spec is not to
> > perpetuate the cockups that occurred in round one of the implementation
> > and to force everyone to pay closer attention to what the spec says.
> > Otherwise the amount of workarounds is just going to grow without
> > bounds.
>
> There's a benefit in having a test suite that prevents new errors from
> being introduced, but there's no benefit in failing on errors that we
> have to work around anyway. We have the code. We're never going to be
> able to remove the code.

It's not about us removing the code, it's about us having an accurate
compliance test. There are two reasons for having a fully correct
compliance test

1. Our work arounds have unintended consequences which have knock
on effects which mean that you don't know if a test failure is
real or an unintended consequence of a work around.
2. New features in specs tend to build on previous features, so
we're going to have a hard time constructing accurate tests for
layered features where we've done a work around for the base
feature.

James




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