Currently most scripts in tests/ have no commentary at all.  They
should all have:

- a copyright declaration;
- a license declaration; and
- a concise description of the property or regression being tested.

I will extract copyright from "darcs changes".  Hopefully this will be
correct, though in some cases the patch may have been recorded by
someone who wasn't the original author, and the author field not
spoofed.

Regarding licensing, I suggest taking the stance that the tests are
implicitly licensed under "GPL (any)" or "GPL2 or higher", as COPYING
contains the GPL2 license.  Add these license declarations, then spam
the authors asking them to reply and "opt out" if they want a
different license (but discouraging it, as heterogeneity will cause
headaches).

For the third point, tests named issueNNN I can use the BTS as a
source of explanation (often just copy-and-pasting the original
message, I guess).  For other tests, I will need to look at "darcs
changes".

Thanks, Trent, for these suggestions. I see that you are presently assigned to 
this issue, but you may not intend to do all of this work by yourself. In any 
case, something that I believe would be extremely useful would be if you could 
take a single existing test (or a few, if more convenient) and change it (or them) 
to be in accordance with your suggestions, copyright declaration, licence, 
description and everything. This could then be used by others as a valuable source 
when other tests are being modified or new ones created. Once a few examples of 
tests exist, I presume that the next steps would be documenting the new 
requirements and then making everybody aware of these requirements.

Thanks and best regards
Thorkil

I intend to get some examples done next weekend.

As Thorkil says, this is one of those tedious drudge jobs.
If *you*, dear reader, could find the time to polish even *one* test,
it would be very much appreciated.

There is a patch in the main repo called "Example for issue1284." which
you can use as a reference.

No changes, moving to back of maintenance queue.

Note that this could an hlint-style task for getting starting with the
basic mechanics of submitting patches to darcs.net