Comments on: Universal Manifest For Unit Tests: A Proposal

By: improving personal hygiene by adjusting mochitests « 3.1415926535897932384626433…

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 21:48:24 +0000

[...] have other great formats available and there has been great discussion around this topic in other blog posts. In general the consensus is keeping something like the reftest manifest format and extending it [...]

By: Ms2ger

Ms2ger — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 11:01:21 +0000

I think the examples in this post make it clear that JSON is not easy enough to use. JSON doesn’t allow quoting strings with single quotes (’), which means none of these ten examples can actually be parsed. Also, the duplicate attributes in #2, #3 and #10 cause information to be lost silently.

By: Robert Kaiser

Robert Kaiser — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 20:24:03 +0000

So, this loses all the info in comments, right? Can there be made something to keep the comments in some way, perhaps as a field in the JSON as the format itself sucks in not allowing real comments?

Also, in case 2, why have two “fails” entries with one “if” each, and not have one “fails” with two “if”s?

And what about using pref values/comparisons in “if” clauses?

By: Jesse Ruderman

Jesse Ruderman — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 19:57:45 +0000

I still see no benefit to replacing the simple existing reftest format with JSON, and a lot of drawbacks. All of the benefits you’ve claimed for moving to JSON have been orthogonal to the overall syntax, and something we could get with much smaller changes. I don’t understand why you continue pushing for moving to JSON when it seems obvious to me that making small changes to the reftest manifest format would result in a format that’s much easier to use.

Btw, #1 and #2 use duplicate attributes. I think you’d need to use JSON arrays rather than JSON hashes in a few spots.