Mark Banner’s thoughts on Thunderbird, Mozilla, Bellringing and more.

More possibilities for testing MailNews

June 4th, 2008 Posted in Mozilla, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird

A few weeks ago, Joshua added a “fake” news server to the mailnews code base for use during xpcshell tests. This gives us the capability to test newsgroup communication at the protocol level which will help with checking for regressions, and replicating situations where we get communications wrong, or where the server doesn’t do what we expect.

As with all good code, the heart of the fake news server was written generically, and so in about day I wrote a fake SMTP server and initial test case (most of that time was learning about how the protocol worked).

Yesterday, this was committed, so now we have very basic coverage of the news and SMTP protocols within the mailnews basic testing.

I’m already looking at extending the SMTP protocol tests to include authentication tests, and over the next few weeks I hope that we can extend these to POP and IMAP.

If anyone wants to take this on, and help us improve our testing facilities and the mailnews code base, then please get involved, just contact me first so I can co-ordinate any efforts. All you’ll need is Thunderbird or SeaMonkey built from source with –enable-tests and some javascript knowledge.

  1. One Response to “More possibilities for testing MailNews”

  2. By Ted Mielczarek on Jun 4, 2008

    Awesome work! Sounds like you guys are on track to make an awesome Thunderbird 3.

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