[mapserver-dev] msautotest considered worthless?

[Paul Ramsey]

After my dance-of-the-thousand-commits with the buildbots last
weekend, I pulled down the autotest suite to see if regression testing
could have helped me avoid the Theatre Of Pain.

What I found was that, to my surprise, huge numbers of the tests in
trunk against trunk fail. I installed the perceptual diff and there
are still large numbers of failures. My thought is that a regression
suite, in order to be useful, should be committed in a state such that
it always has *no* failures, so that the existence of a failure in
your local sandbox is a positive Call to Action, to figure out What
You Did Wrong.

So, am I missing something, or has the test suite basically been
allowed to degenerate into a heap?  There is no point in having the
suite if it is not maintained and used along with the code, is the
appetite basically not there?

P.