Hi everybody!
I'm currently putting the finishing touch on a new module
(Device::Symcod::RS422) that communicates with devices over a serial
link. In the process of writing tests for that module, I found myself
needing to fake the presence of such a device, that could communicate as
needed with a function without further intervention on my part.
To my surprise, I couldn't find any module that would do this, so I
wrote my own. To quote from the manpage:
IO::FakeTty creates a pseudo-terminal (also known as "pseudo tty" or
"pty") and attaches a talker/listener slave to the other end. The
slave can then be instructed to write to the pty, or read from it and
return its contents. Since the slave runs in a separate process, this
can be done in parallel with the execution of the main program.
This module is primarily intended for testing Perl code which
interacts with a terminal. Given a black-box function or method, you
can determine what it sends to its tty, and how it reacts when fed a
given input.
(This is somewhat the opposite of Test::Expect, which tests
applications from the outside, while IO::FakeTty allows testing Perl
code from the inside.)
Before uploading this module to CPAN, I have three questions:
1. Did I re-invent the wheel? As I said, I couldn't find anything out
there that did the job, but maybe I missed something obvious.
2. Did I miss a more elegant or easier solution? Intuitively, I'm
inclined to believe that a tied filehandle would not have been
applicable, but I could be wrong.
3. What would be a more appropriate name for this module? I opted
against Test::*, since this is not a test module per se. Would it make
sense to move it into the IO::Tty namespace (IO::Tty::FakeDevice,
maybe?), even though there's already a distribution by that name?
Thanks!
--
Maybe it's time to break that.
-- Larry Wall in <[email protected]>
