I've noticed in a lot of areas of life, there are are whole bunch of unwritten rules and things are done a certain way, but no one ever bothers to write them down. Then someone just breaking into the community has a hard time because they never know what they did wrong.
Well, recently I decided I might like to try to contribute to another free software project. The latest version of distributions (fedora core 16, 64 bit) break my old athena widget based wograld map editor, so I thought perhaps I would try to change gridarta in order to add support for wograld maps. Then I found out that gridarta doesn't just support crossfire, but a couple forks, Daimonin and Atrinik as well. Anyway, the lead developer for gridarta looked at our code and did not like it. He said all the unit tests were broke. When I forked crossfire to make wograld, I did not know what a unit test was or what they were for. He also did not like the fact we were still using CVS.
Okay, now I have several questions.
1 What is a unit test and do most projects insist on them?
2) How can I retroactively write unit tests for the current wograld project?
3) Why do people care so much about switching to subversion?