5011b739391b6a1b6129d473b6c050010baf1f6f
braney
  Sat Sep 19 17:57:37 2026 -0700
testRegistry: a registry of which unit test defends which ticket

A bug ticket has no way to say whether a test now defends its fix, and a test
has no way to say which bug it came from.  The two questions are asked from
opposite ends and neither the tree nor Redmine answers either one.

utils/testRegistry/registry.tsv is that table, hand written, one row per ticket
per test, starting at v504.  Unit tests only: the browser-page regression tests
are the docent suite, refs #38252, which already names each script for its
ticket, and a docent column here says which ticket has one of those too.

Each row says why a unit test is the right test, because "the fix is in a
library file" is wrong in both directions.  A wording fix in hg/lib needs no
unit test, and a performance rewrite inside hgTracks needs one badly, since
nothing else can tell that the slow path has come back.  The three reasons are
invisible, perf and library, and a perf row says what has to be measured --
queries, passes, allocations, bytes -- never wall-clock seconds.

testRegistry reads it: ticket, test, release, why, needed, unwatched, tickets,
check.  No network and no database, so the check can run anywhere.

check is why the table is checked in rather than derived.  A registry that
quietly names files nobody has, saying a bug is covered when it is not, is
worse than no registry, so check fails the build the day a row rots.  Its own
tests are in tests/, with one row of input/bad.tsv per complaint check can
make, and utils/makefile runs the whole thing so it reaches make test from src.

Today: 37 tickets, 12 covered by 11 tests, 25 waiting.

refs #38391

diff --git src/utils/testRegistry/makefile src/utils/testRegistry/makefile
new file mode 100644
index 00000000000..4595708920c
--- /dev/null
+++ src/utils/testRegistry/makefile
@@ -0,0 +1,15 @@
+kentSrc = ../..
+
+# Nothing is compiled here.  testRegistry is a python3 script and registry.tsv is the
+# data it reads, so the only target that does anything is test, and utils/makefile calls
+# it from its own test target.  That is what puts the registry's check into `make test`
+# from src, which is the whole reason the check is worth having.
+
+all:
+	@echo "testRegistry: nothing to build, see README"
+
+test:
+	cd tests && ${MAKE} test
+
+clean:
+	cd tests && ${MAKE} clean