As part of my work on this ticket in the 'parallel' branch, I have finally begun writing some basic tests for the 'gen' configuration steps: config/gen/*.pm. These steps -- which are the final configuration steps -- primarily look data up in source files, files generated earlier in the configuration process and/or the Parrot::Configure object and then print that data in files used by 'make'.
Since what actually gets printed to file is very system/platform/C-compiler-dependent, there's not much point in testing that. So the tests primarily ask questions like: Can we locate the source files named in the step? Can we locate data in the Parrot::Configure object as needed? As we've done in refactoring some of the other config step classes, in many places I'm moving hard-coded lists of source files from deep inside a particular step's runstep() method into its _init() method. For two reasons: (1) Since _init() is defined at the top of each class's file, the hard-coded stuff is now more visible. (2) If data is in the _init() subroutine, it's more easily mockable during tests. Since I'm not done with this testing/refactoring, I'm not submitting a patch yet. But anyone can see what's happening by doing a checkout of the 'parallel' branch from the repository. Thank you very much. kid51
