Should we move our test suites to ecmascript.org?

[Christian Plesner Hansen]

>> I believe that there are still IPR policy issues that need to be worked
>> through before any test suite development that is affiliated with ECMA/T39
>> could accept contributions from organizations or individuals who do not have
>> an ECMA membership affiliation.  An advantage of the current
>> google/codeplex/mozilla projects, is that they don't have this restriction.
>> While ecmascript.org is not exactly officially associated with ECMA/TC-39 it
>> is close enough that I don't think we should try to host a test suite
>> project there until we resolve the IPR issues.

I agree that for ECMA to give its stamp of approval, whatever form
that might take, causes extra complications.  But I don't know why
ecmascript.org should be so closely linked with ECMA that we can't use
it for this.  Isn't it up to us, Brendan really, to decide how to use
it?

> My main concern about these projects is not hosting or control, but the fact
> that there are several of them. I think it would be more useful to the
> community to have a single ECMAScript conformance test suite, covering all
> of ES5, including the bits inherited from ES3. If all parties are willing to
> use one of the existing sites for hosting, that is not a problem as far as
> I'm concerned.

I think it's important that this is and is perceived as, now and in
the long run, a vendor neutral project.  If we host it with vendor A,
for any choice of A including google, it's much too easy for people to
consider it A's project, and in particularly for other vendors to not
consider it theirs.

> Note: the WebKit project has a number of ECMAScript tests at
> <http://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/LayoutTests/fast/js>, though we have
> not sorted over them to determine which are for ECMAScript proper rather
> than extensions, and which would be suitable as conforamance tests. We would
> consider donating tests to a shared ECMAScript conformance test suite if
> there were a single canonical test suite. Many of our tests cover edge cases
> that may not otherwise be covered by a conformance suite.

I've been using the ES5 layout tests myself and they are indeed very
thorough.  Having them be part of the common test suite would be
excellent.


-- Christian