On Saturday 29 March 2008 12:51:34 Buddy Burden wrote: > The first is that _during development_, I want to stop my tests on the > first failure.
Get a better harness. > The second sticking point is the concept of plans, and here is where I > really want to understand the reasoning behind it. My understanding > is that a plan has one primary function: to insure that if a test > script dies before all the tests are run, that is recognized as an > error. Now, in my own test scripts, I achieved this via a very simple > methodology: all my scripts ended with a simple print statement: "ALL > DONE". I ran the script, and if I saw my ALL DONE at the end, the > script was fine. If I didn't, I obviously had a problem. Very > simple, very clean. My implementation was a bit simplistic, perhaps, > but no matter how much I've read about testing in Perl, I still can't > see why the idea itself isn't sound. Any solution which requires a human being to read and think about the output beyond "It's all okay!" or "Something fell!"* is not a long-term solution. In particular, you lose the separation between producing TAP and interpreting TAP, as well as the automation benefits of both. > So I guess I'm looking for enlightenment. I can't help but feel like > there's something I'm missing. If the only function of a test plan is > to make sure all the tests are run, my method handles that, and it's > simpler and requires less bookkeeping. The other function of a test plan is to make sure that you aren't running *more* tests than you intended. If you don't know why that's important, try patching File::Find sometime. I have. > Not criticizing, not claiming my method is better, just looking for > any reasons why this wouldn't work. And, JIC there's some agreement > that it _would_ work, I've already put together a patch for Test::Most > that does it. That is, at the top of your script, you put this: > > use Test::Most 'defer_plan'; > > and at the bottom of your script, you put this: > > all_done(); > > and it just DTRT. The implementation is perhaps not as clean as I'd > like it to be, but it's not a horrific hack either. I'm going to > forward it to Ovid through normal CPAN channels. > > Thoughts? Suppose you take advantage of the existence of Test::Builder and roll in several other testing modules, per good programming practice of re-using working and well-tested code. Whose responsibility is it then to emit the single canonical all_done() call? I realize that this suggests that multiple test libraries should be able to add to the plan, and I'm sort of okay with that as well. -- c * I stopped reading Cerebus at Guys, partly because it was so difficult to find new phone books and partly because the second ascension ended so....
