[TIP] why you should distribute tests with your application / module

Pete pfein at pobox.com
Wed Sep 17 09:56:35 PDT 2008


On Sep 17, 2008, at 10:40 AM, Jesse Noller wrote:
> Then don't make it completely random - weight the selections instead.
> My example was focused on random-ish file data that you could *always*
> reproduce with a given key. For a full text search, you're going could
> use the same seed concept, but break the words from your source (a
> static lorem ipsum file[0]) into groups and assign them
> popularity/frequencies and so on - or use the generator class from the
> lorem-ipsum-generator you linked to[1]. Heck use /usr/share/dict/words
> to generate the data :)

Y'know, this is starting to sound like a lot of work... all for the  
purpose of generating nonsense text to avoid downloading a file.   
Bandwidth is cheap, my neurons are not.

I still maintain that there are situations where it's desirable/ 
preferable to have real, static fixture data.  Here are a few more  
OTOMH: financial algorithms, image processing, regression tests of  
text parsing. Anyone have recommendations on best practices for doing  
so (as opposed to continuing to tell me how to avoid the problem  
entirely)?  Thanks.

--Pete



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