On Fri, 5 Nov 2010, Brett Lymn wrote:
To verify curses at this sort of abstraction level, one needs a terminal emulator of sorts, and check the resulting "appearance".Why? All the terminal emulator will be doing is taking the command sequences and rendering those as cursor motions and characters. They will always be the same sequences. We are not talking about human input here where a human can mix up the key presses to arrive at the same goal.
Your reasoning seems to imply that, if we were to change libcurses to use a different, more optimum character sequence to generate a specific screen appearance, that would be considered a regression. I disagree with that reasoning.
It is not libcurse's job to generate a specific character sequence, but to produce a specific appearance. The fact that it uses a character sequence to produce that appearance is an implementation detail, and should not be the target of a regression test.
------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Paul Goyette | PGP Key fingerprint: | E-mail addresses: | | Customer Service | FA29 0E3B 35AF E8AE 6651 | paul at whooppee.com | | Network Engineer | 0786 F758 55DE 53BA 7731 | pgoyette at juniper.net | | Kernel Developer | | pgoyette at netbsd.org | -------------------------------------------------------------------------