
How the GNU coreutils are tested (2017) - njn
http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/coreutils-testing.html
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wmu
Really nice overview.

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Sir_Cmpwn
Have you ever heard that old phrase "you can either make a program so simple
it obviously has no bugs, or you can make a program so complex that it has no
obvious bugs"?

GNU programs are the latter. That's why they need to go to such lengths to
test "cat".

~~~
taeric
Trite, and seems to ignore evolution. Most of the complexity in these
utilities came from emergent behaviour.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Wrong, most of the complexity was designed in. Have you ever read the source
code for GNU coreutils? And maybe compared it to the POSIX specification for
those tools?

~~~
0xcde4c3db
GNU true/false in particular is like one of those jokes that takes two minutes
to build up to a cheesy pun at the end:

Overly elaborate setup:
[https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/true....](https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/true.c)

Snappy punchline:
[https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/false...](https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/false.c)

