>In effect I wish to know whats holding us back? Whats missing that can't
>be replaced by a few thousand extra monkeys like me pressing the
>unexpected buttons on the keyboard? Am I missing the point of the test
>suite all together?

>Randal

As i've read it, the test suites are automatic. That means that a developer
who is tweaking some deep down sql parser or page swapper/zipper thingy to
get some more speed out
of the system, can do his tweak - run the test suites, and then immediatly
see if he has broken something. With no test suites, we'd have to wait days,
weeks or even longer before someone out there by accident fired off a query
that was weird enough to break the new code.

Test suites are invaluable, but fortunately they can be rebuilt. it will
take a lot of time for a dedicated team, but time and people (i hope) we
have in the community. The existing test suites are - imo - very important
for
the community. Also the existing bugs and features databases. It *would*
make a difference reg. the
stabillity of future interbase versions.

Regards
Dennis Fantoni
df@...
dennis@...
Senior developer (Delphi interbase ) at Danasoft A/S - www.danasoft.dk