You mean Apache httpd ... the thing which is called a-patchy-httpd server? (that is not a joke!).
Apache httpd existed many years before junit was invented in 1997. Long before TDD became a thing and our rigorous modern understanding set in. For a second, I even thought the Apache Foundation (founded because of httpd) later hosted junit, but I was wrong, is the Eclipse Foundation.
junit was not invented, it was a port from Smalltalk's SUnit, which was created on 1989, ~6 years before the first release of Apache. Yes, the extreme programming (XP) craze hadn't popularized TDD, but united testing as a practice already existed, even if only some communities.
Though I agree, that although not a technical justification, an explanation as to why there are no tests is because Apache HTTP is from the 90's. Not writing unit tests was par for course back then. Most FLOSS code bases in the 90s didn't have unit tests, let a alone a CI to run the test suite for each change. Adding tests later is hard. Though there are some tests under the test folder.
Junit was one of the first libraries to popularise modern patterns of unit testing.
Some people were writing their own ad-hoc scaffolds before that but it wasn't a widespread practice. Testing meant manual testers clicking on things in the UI, and sophisticated testing was if you had checklists of things to test manually.
Based on https://github.com/apache/httpd/commits?author=covener, either the committer never writes tests, or this project just doesn't do testing at all. Nothing here would pass a code review at my company. Totally insane.
Your company, and others like it, are of course entitled to a refund. These infrastructural projects never get any funding when everything goes well, but when an overworked maintainer screws up in good faith, everybody piles on them.
The attacks on OpenSSL maintainers ten years ago were disgusting, and I think we've learned nothing since then.
Depends on what, exactly, the developers are doing with them projects! If those are in the "maintenance mode" (no new features, just fixing bugs and making sure it still builds with newer toolchains/ecosystems), then this amount of humanpower may be quite reasonable.
It's still a drop in the ocean, heard of that KISS-CAM CEO that got busted for cheating? His company literally seems to be built on selling hosted Apache Airflow services and just took in a series D round of 93 MUSD.
Open source is open, so naturally people can use it but the ecosystem has also been at a breaking point for years and bad actors has caught the scent of that.
The vast majority of ASF projects are in maintenance mode. This isn’t a bad thing, but compared to a project like the Linux kernel for example, Apache httpd is mature software that doesn’t require many full time developers to maintain.
Developers can only be as good at their jobs as their environment allows them to be. Based on the commit log for all authors, my takeaway here is that this is a legacy software project that needs better test coverage and to establish standards around adding tests when merging in contributions.
Feel free to contribute one. I’m sure the maintainers would welcome it…
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