[Zope-dev] Re: zope.sendmail Retry fixes and new state machine.

[David Pratt]

Hi Andreas. I think your response gets to the heart of the issue. For 
software to be useful, it is often more important for folks other than 
the author to understand it. This can only occur with communication. 
Sometimes it is the understanding of edgecases in particular, that gets 
lost over time. I find generally that I cannot keep in memory all of the 
details of the code I write. Several months afterwards without my own 
documentation, these details can be lost. So it is just important if I 
need to come back to it myself as for anyone else.

If the test is worth writing, it is not difficult to add a small amount 
of text to communicate about it. If the software is worth writing in the 
first place, I consider the code incomplete without doctests. For 
community projects, it is often the case that it is not the author 
maintaining the code in the future. This only strengthens the argument 
for doctests and the reason this has become the standard for zope.

Regards,
David



Andreas Jung wrote:

> usage of your module. It's basically not of interest for telling them 
> all edgecases. Addressing edgecase is unittests is basically good enough 
> for me. They sometime require more code to test and put this into a 
> doctest is often just overhead.
> 
> Andreas
> 
> 
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