Re: Patch pre-submission to Sashiko

["Theodore Tso" <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Wed, Oct 21, 2026 at 11:45:24AM -0500, Andrew Morton wrote:
> 
> If someone's fixing something I don't see much value in
> retaining/maintaining a test case for something we've already fixed. 
> This is considered good engineering practice but why bother - we fixed
> it!  Move on.

It's considered good engineering practice because regularly running
the test allows regresssions to be detected, and by increasing test
coverage, it makes life easier to feel confident that a future code
change, or rebase, is ultimately correct.

Of course, you need to do the cost/benefit tradeoff.  If the test
takes a very long time to run, or if maintaining it requires a huge
amount of code outside of the test, then it could be that the benefits
aren't worth the on-going costs of keeping the test around.

This is one of the reasons why I'm a big fan of unit testing.  The
unit tests tend to run much more quickly than integration-style tests.

     	   	       	    	 - Ted