Chat about integration tests / installer

[Rod Widdowson]

Let's chat this afternoon, but an immediate thought.

At a philosophical level I'm not sure that I like adding code which is only there to make a test work.  I'm very happy to make a
test work by exploiting existing function.

So at an "easily-argue-me-out-of-it" level I would resist re-populate and post-populate stages unless we could see a mainline value
in it (and fed installers may be it).  

OTOH I'm completely happy with extending property-ization.  I also accept that it’s a purely subjective line between the two which
why it would take little persuading to change my mind.

> To avoid generating credentials, we might need to adjust
> 
>  <condition property="idp.will.call.certgen">
> 
> with some checks to make sure the credentials don't already exist, e.g. :

That’s certainly true, there is an element of cross-linking in there which I worry about "I know that if I am installing this file
then I can install that file".

Which leads me to.... 

.... I'm wondering whether V4 is the time to rebuild that whole mess again.  To be honest I'm not sure that I know what I mean by
that but I'll observe that it can take me upwards of 40 minutes to get a basic feel of it every time I have to crack the code open
and upwards of a couple of hours to get the whole picture in my head and that is a frightening position for the main developer of a
software module to be in.

It could be that when we strip out all the V2 stuff things will get to a size whereby we can re-enforce some sort of structure and
coding rules on it (things like "add dependencies at the correct level only").  

Of course we have to make the documented "API" the same which means we are only talking re-factoring, not re-architecting.

/R