What is acceptable as 'open-source'?

[Paul Rubin]

"Frank Millman" <frank at chagford.com> writes:
> I could stick to hg (or git) but I have recently come across fossil,
> and it seems ideal for my needs. Has anyone used it? 

I've played with it.  It's incredibly impressive for such a
comparatively small program.  But, it's kind of niche, and even hg has
become niche, everyone is using git now.  Self-hosting git repositories
can be pretty simple, nearly trivial with git-daemon, or slightly
fancier with gitweb.  There are also full-on fancy solutions like gitlab
or gitstar: I'm not up on the latest of these things.

> There is no test suite (shock, horror). I have not got my head around
> that yet. The things that I could write tests for are so trivial

In my experience, writing tests for existing code is a big pain in the
neck and doesn't really get good coverage.  The best way to write tests
is with a development style where you write the tests at the same time
that you write the code.  This will have implications for the way the
code is organized, so it's much harder to retrofit tests after the fact.
But at least, you can write some integration tests.  I'm old-fashioned
and use dejagnu for that.  I think there's newer and trendier stuff now
though.