Thanks all, especially Ovid who came closest to answering the actual question, i.e. can someone explain it to me *in a perlish way*. Ovid's example used Test::Class's setup/teardown; would anyone else be able to provide confirm that I'm making sense in the following Test::Harness/Test::More style example:
1. Assume a test file t/foo.t 2. Assume a directory t/data (or t/fixtures if you will -- I just call it data in my own tests). 3. Create a file t/data/foo.yml (or whatever data format) containing the data needed by the tests in foo.t 4. At the beginning of foo.t, load data/foo.yml into whatever data structure (memory, SQLite, real database, etc) 5. Run tests against foo.t 6. When foo.t exits, tear down the data created in step 4. Yes? In other words "fixtures" is just a jargony name for t/data/, right? And, is the above setup/teardown stuff right, or would you do it before each individual test? That would seem to be nearly nonsensical, but then, I've seen stupider ideas. My earlier comment about Test::Builder-based test modules was that some of the fixtures stuff I've seen used repeated code chunks to go over the contents of foo.yml, for instance doing validation runs against each record, and it looked to me as if the Perlish way to do that is to write a test module that provides record_is_valid() and related stuff. As I understand it now, this isn't actually part of "fixtures" conceptually, it's just something that one might tend to see near fixtures. K.
