Re: [docbook-apps] Docbook XSL and FOP 2.0

[Thomas Schraitle <tom_schr@web.de>]

Hi Radu,

On Tue, 30 Jun 2015 09:23:03 +0300
Radu Coravu <radu_coravu@sync.ro> wrote:

> I think the problem with most open source software is that there is
> no specialized Quality Assurance team.
> We, the public who uses the product are the QA team.

That's probably true, but with the help of test driven development,
continuous integration (Travis, Jenkins, ...), etc. things progress
slowly. 


> [...]
> I think that a relatively bug-free open source product needs to have 
> three things:
> 
> 1) Automated tests which are run every night and should detect 
> regression problems.
> 2) Shorter release cycles.
> 3) Large user based.
> 
> Probably Apache FOP only has (3), at least in this particular case.

I also tried to compile FOP for openSUSE, but I failed too. :-(

However, I see it is difficult to implement a dedicate "complete" test
suite from scratch. I suppose, the FOP developers try to invest their
spare time in more important things.

For example, when my trainee and I implemented our docmanager[1] script
we've used test driven development. Now we have a test suite which
comprises of 163 test cases. This test suite is checked by Travis[2] on
every commit or pull request. This makes development very easy and fun. 
However, I suppose, it wouldn't be fun if you must write a test suite
from scratch.

I would love to see a dedicated test suite for FOP, but also for the
DocBook stylesheets. At the moment, this is not the case. IMHO, this is
the reason, why we don't see lots of releases in the past (see my
other mail about this topic).


------
[1] https://github.com/openSUSE/docmanager/
[2] https://travis-ci.org/openSUSE/docmanager

-- 
Gruß/Regards,
    Thomas Schraitle