jonny (nonvenomous) (jonny@neuromatch.social)'s status on Sunday, 31-May-2026 13:45:14 JST

So, look. One shot rewriting the whole test suite in another language is probably not great to do, but what happened here is so much worse than you are expecting.

https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/pull/903/

This does not "translate tests into pytest" or a unit testing framework, it writes its own testing framework where tests are whole python scripts that redefine basic test functions in every script. Surely there would be a single way to "run rsync and get the results" - nope, well, there is, but then every test file will randomly redefine its own _run_and_capture function. So like now rsync needs a test suite for its test suite.

If instead of telling an LLM to "rewrite the tests in python" you just searched "python testing" you would find the pytest docs. And then you would find examples. And then you could write fixtures to deduplicate all the prior shell script setup and teardown stuff, and so on. But since it was just "rewrite the tests in python" its now worse than before, and the odds of the rewrite actually being a 100% faithful translation are close to 0.