Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes wrote:
David Cantrell wrote:
Any test suite that blithely ignores warnings is BROKEN.
The second type of warning is the one that tells you when you the author
have fucked up, like, when you say "my $variable" twice, or saying
"$variable = 'one thing'" and "$varable = 'something else'". I deal
with those by having $SIG{__WARN__} turn them into die()s in the tests.
If you don't deal with them, you're saying that you don't care about
tripping yourself up in the future.
I have to disagree here. You are saying that it is the test's
responsibility to fail if it issues any warnings. I believe
an author may choose to scan the test output and rely on seeing
messages to go to stderr.
Please, tell me how I can scan the test output on - say - Windows. Bear
in mind that I do not own a Windows licence, nor do I have any hardware
that will run Windows without lots of annoying faffing around.
When a user installs my module on Windows, he will probably type
something like:
C:\> perl -MCPAN -e 'install Daves::Module'
which will handle any dependencies for him. If my module - or one of
the dependencies - spits out a warning, the user is likely to miss it
when it scrolls past too fast to read. Even worse, he might see it, and
ignore it because of the bit at the bottom that says "all tests passed".
THAT is why I believe warnings in tests should be fatal by default.
It means I am more likely to get useful bug reports. It also means I'll
get "pro-active" bug reports from the CPAN testers.
> Obviously it's better to do as you
propose, but that takes extra work in every test to implement.
$SIG{__WARN__} = sub { die(@_) };
so much extra work! Or if you're less of a depdencies-fascist than I
am, use Test::NoWarnings for even less typing.
Authors should not be counted on to do so
Authors are giving their work away for free. They shouldn't be counted
on to do *anything*.
> and when they don't
go that extra mile, their warnings should not just get lost.
Of course. It would be nice if they weren't *ignored* though.
Hrrm, I'm going to go away now and think about how I can inject that
__WARN__ handler into everyone elses tests when I run them :-)
--
David Cantrell
