[Zope-Coders] Re: [Zope] WebDAV Locks / 2.4.3/ MS Office 2000

[Tres Seaver]

Andreas Jung wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Tres Seaver" <tseaver@zope.com>
> To: "Andreas Jung" <andreas@andreas-jung.com>
> Cc: "Chris Withers" <chrisw@nipltd.com>; "Joachim Werner"
> <joe@iuveno-net.de>; "Jason Earl" <jason.earl@simplot.com>;
> <zope-coders@zope.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2002 07:16
> Subject: Re: [Zope-Coders] Re: [Zope] WebDAV Locks / 2.4.3/ MS Office 2000
> 
> 
> 
> 
>>You are also going to need to defend the changes, as they are
>>
>>potentially destabilizing for clients which do WebDAV correctly
>>(at least if I understand to tag-end of the discussion I have
>>seen so far).  A unit tests for a feature which depends on a
>>REQUEST header just needs to synthesize an appropriate request
>>(i.e., it needs to pretend to be the publisher), no?
>>
>>
> 
> We can not cover interoperability issues through unit tests because
> it requires the *detailed* knowledge how the (WebDAV) client reacts
> and behaves. In the case of M$ applications we have learned that
> their behaviour is often unpredictable and non-compliant with
> specifications.
> This means we must test the most common WebDAV applications
> against Zope. That's what we have done in the past after lots of changes
> to the WebDAV code. I don't know a suitable testing method to cover
> such interoperability test.

If you are adding code which is supposed to be effective only in
the presence of a particular request header, then it should be possible
to write a unit test which asserts that the feature occurs when that
header is present, but doesn't when not.  The information needed to
do the test is the same as the information needed to add the feature.

I am particularly concerned that code which gets added to the core to
work around bugs in clients be isolated, where possilble;  otherwise,
well-behaved clients pay the freight (increased complexity, and therefore
increased likelihood of bugs) for the buggy ones.

Tres.
-- 
===============================================================
Tres Seaver                                tseaver@zope.com
Zope Corporation      "Zope Dealers"       http://www.zope.com