As far as I understand it, owTvApplicationHtmlDocGeneratorTest will break whenever a single character changes in the description strings of one application. But what does it really tell us, apart from the fact that the doc changed ?
Actually it will break only if a description string of ReadImageInfo changes (it’s the only application tested with it): https://gitlab.orfeo-toolbox.org/orfeotoolbox/otb/blob/develop/Modules/Wrappers/ApplicationEngine/test/CMakeLists.txt#L104
I agree that there is a fine line between a regression test (good) and a “change detector” test (bad). And in OTB in general we have a lot of test that are 99% or even 100% false positives because of this. So yes I think this one could be removed.
I have a long term idea for improving the documentation to completely remove the html doc and replace it with the new cookbook rendering. I already started work in this direction in MR 316 by making GetDocLink point to the cookbook (the link that’s shown in the command line help), maybe one day. I mean… look at this ugly monster, applications are missings, empty caterogies, no formatting, etc. The new cookbook is hopefully better. The only thing is to figure out how to ship it with otbgui, then we can remove the entire “html doc” module.
Ok, so in fact the purpose of this test is to test the HTML generator itself, and not the HTML doc generated for the ReadImageInfo app? Maybe we should keep it then?