Well, that didn’t turn out well 
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I haven’t been able to spend much time on Graphviz the last couple of months, but I have a small hope that that will change in the semi-near future.
One Idea I have is to write a completely new test suite that tests Graphviz from the ground up. I’m thinking of making this completely in C++, generate SVG in memory, parse that and check for correctness. What do you think about such an idea? Any objections? Suggestions to do it otherwise? Problem with that approach?
I’m thinking to write this in modern C++ which means the tests will only run on the latest OS versions since we cannot support > C++11 on all OSs. I’m thinking that these tests should focus on the core stuff of Graphviz that is orthogonal to OSs and output formats.
The main benefits would be:
- I get to practice my C++ skills which have gone from zero to…, well slight more than zero, during the last 6 month since I started a new assignment together with a very skilled colleague who is eager to help me learn.
- We will get a much better test coverage than we have today and make us more confident to make changes.
- We will hopefully get an infrastructure where it’s easy to add new tests even for tricky corner cases.
- The tests will run fast since we wouldn’t need to read or write any files.
- SVG is easy to parse.
Thoughts?