Talk:Test Cases
From GPLv3 Wiki
These are good comments. Please put them in the comment system; that way, they can be reviewed by discussion committees and considered appropriately.
Since these should be moved to the comments system, I'm removing the link here from the front page. Please empty these pages once the comments have been submitted.
Thanks for your feedback and your help.
--brett 17:09, 21 January 2006 (EST)
I think this sort of information is better suited to a wiki. I thought of this page not as comments on the license but rather as a way of understanding the license by characterizing its real-world behavior. It's not intended to be opinion, but fact: it tries to document what the license actually does in a series of situations. (Or what possible things it might do when there is ambiguity.) It's a way to guard against regressions in the license: when a change that fixes a problem raised by one comment breaks something else. If we can capture most or all of the interesting GPL situations here, someone can check each one for each draft and feel confident that nothing slipped through the cracks. If it is buried in comments, it becomes much more difficult to check. As I write this, there are 451 comments on the draft, which are only organized by order of submission. I have faith that the committees will review them, but will they go back and read all the comments and apply them to each successive draft, to make sure that everything still works as expected? And will people not on the committee check it as well? I think distilling it into test cases converts it to a form that people are more likely to use both to understand and fix the license.
I don't mean to suggest that comments are bad in themselves - I think the comment interface is extremely well done, and it is well suited to expressing opinions about the license or to discuss the details of the wording. I think that a set of test cases complements that interface rather than replacing it.
--stefie10 18:37, 25 January 2006 (EST)
