[parted-devel] [PATCH] mkpartfs ext2 2 10 would erroneously report "file system too small"

[Jim Meyering]

Otavio Salvador <otavio at debian.org> wrote:
> David Cantrell <dcantrell at redhat.com> writes:
>
>> Otavio, Jim.... First, you both have good points here, but I think we've
>> missed something here with our unit testing framework.  Ideally, the
>> developer shouldn't also be the one to write all the testing.  For
>> maximum testing effectiveness, unit tests should be written by another
>> person rather than the author.  We should think about this going
>> forward.

Personally, I'm comfortable with requiring a test case with nearly every
bug-fixing and feature-adding change.  But I have to admit that it'd sure
be nice to find a helper who'd work in parallel with me converting test
outlines into actual code.

> Right I agree that it's the ideal but it's hard to get there for a FS
> project.
>
>> We also need to take in to account that the parted code base is not in
>> great shape.  It's had many hands in it and we all are trying to bring
>> it up to date and correct a lot of defects.  Jim's patch clears a make
>> distcheck failure which, in my opinion, is more important in the short
>> term than a unit test for the function.

Actually, I'm working on a patch to clear a distcheck failure.
The one we're talking about was for a bug I discovered while trying
to exercise a code path affected by Flavio's recent patch.

...
> I personally dislike the 8 spaces and I'm starting to think that tabs
> might grant the visual flexibility we might need. Most of time 2 or 4
> spaces are enough and makes easier to avoid line breaks.

On this point, I agree.
Requiring eight columns per indentation level is too much.
That results in splitting too many lines in order to accommodate
the 80-column limit.

I thought we'd all agreed on using space-only indentation.  Realize that
TAB-based indentation doesn't really give you the flexibility you want,
since whatever we agree upon as a standard has to specify (for column
counting, and hence line-wrapping) how many columns each occupies.
So even if you tell your editor that a TAB takes 4 spaces, if the lines
were wrapped with a TAB==8 standard, it'll still look bad, due to the
excessively wrapped lines.