Re: Names of test cases (Was: Halfway to genericizing...)

[David_Marston@lotus.com]

At this stage, only a couple points need clarification.

>>2. The catalog can be flatter in structure than the actual directory
>>structure because the Identifier element gives a file-path from the
>>submitter's top directory down to where the "primary" input file is
>>found. Other files may need to be located by relative pathing from
>>there. (The "primary" files varies with the "operation" value.)

>Yes, it may be, but are you saying it "shall be"?

If that question is about the catalog being flatter: Iron Man says
yes, it is flatter. If that question is about relative paths: that
should emerge from Wednesday's discussion of how we build scripts out
of the catalog data. In other words, an important part of the
exchange of ideas is forming an expectation about changing current
directories as the various tests are executed.

>How do we know the convention the user has already used with "_" and
>that this translation isn't going to introduce ambiguity?

One good point: we only need to map / to _ for the hyperlinks, while
for file discovery it's / to \ on some systems. (And / to : on a
Macintosh, should anyone care.) Even if the submitter used _ in the
names, they would have to have an entrapment-oriented directory
naming scheme to generate a conflict. For example, to have a conflict
on sort_key_predicate, they would need to have both
   a key_predicate file in the sort directory and
   a predicate file in the sort_key directory.
I think that the hierarchical thinking and common-sense naming that we
expect from good testers would rule out such conflicts 99.99999% of
the time. (Common sense: if it's about sort and key, it belongs in the
sort_key directory, not in the plain old sort directory.)

I think the notion of reusing the file names is uncomfortably close to
reality. The Lotus/Xalan tests were going to have test01, test02, etc.
in every directory until I said that we should have unique names for
conversational purposes (and it turns out that we make heavy use of
the disambiguated names in conversation). The notion of "why bother
with separate names when they are already in separate directories" may
have prevailed in other shops.

I, too, am bothered by the potential length of the hyperlink names.
We'll have to keep an eye on it.
.................David Marston