Stuart Ballard wrote: >(including the Classpath list as well as Mauve list here as I don't >know how many people actually read the mauve list) > >Recently on the Harmony list there's been some discussion of how tests >should be written and where they should be put. I chimed in pointing >out what I thought would be a no-brainer - tests for public APIs >should be in Mauve of course. > > Indeed. >I only just made that post and I haven't seen the responses yet, but >it occurred to me to look and see what Mauve's license is just to make >sure that wouldn't be a showstopper, and, well, as I'm sure many of >you know, it's GPL. > >This is slightly strange to me. We (the Free Software community) are >forced to make our own test suite because Sun won't release theirs >under terms we can use, but when we do write our own, we put it under >a license that prevents even other Free Software projects from working >with it. Our test suite is under a stronger copyleft than Classpath >itself is! > >I understand why we want Classpath itself to be copyleft. But what on >earth benefit are we getting from preventing people from >"proprietarizing" our testsuite? > > Free to use, free to redistribute, and since you'll never want to combine Mauve with anything else, I can't see why the GPL is considered a showstopper. >My understanding is that a license change could be difficult to effect >at this point because I don't think a copyright assignment has been >required for Mauve contributions and therefore there are probably a >lot of copyright holders, some of whom may be difficult to track down. >But if it *could* be managed (and if the Harmony hackers could be >persuaded to put their tests there), I think it would be a major win >for everybody. > > I think a more significant "problem" is practical: Mauve, which predates JUnit, uses its own test harness and Harmony is using JUnit. Integrating the two is a pile of work that you're not going to find anyone willing to spend time on. I think we should just accept that there are going to be two separate test suites, that will overlap in some places. It's not that big a deal in the scheme of things. >Mauve gets a bunch of new contributors (Harmony certainly seems to >have a fair bit of momentum at this point) and code (I believe some of >Harmony's big contributions came with test suites that could be >integrated). > >Classpath and Harmony both get a bunch of new tests. > > We have those tests now, just in separate places. Regards, Dave
