I have two stories related to files. I'll start with the failure: I wanted to write a Test::Harness wrapper that would monitor all the files/directories that the .t files of my test suite opened, and when they change to rerun only the affected tests.
I am still planning on hacking this unportably using fs_usage on OSX and strace on linux, using FAM or whatever as the monitoring backend, but i would much rather have a mechanism like LD_PRELOAD for perl, with which i could add fancy hooks for IO operations without resorting to deep magic. The second story is abou Devel::FIXME. Devel::FIXME installs a subreference in @INC, that is always triggerred first. Then it recursively re-requires the file that was asked for, and this time when the callback is triggerred it pretends to fail. When it finds the file using the "normal" require, it will then read the file line by line, and report all FIXMEs using a cool api to filter unwanted ones. It then has additional boilerplate code to fake the "success" of an included module. Luckily all require return values are passed in scalar context so I didn't have to worry about *that* ;-) Audrey subsequently told me about the (undocumented) feature that lets you *return* a subroutine ref from a subroutine ref in @INC, that lets you get the source of the file that was normally found line by line for filtering. THat's what Acme::use::strict::with::pride, but I didn't know of it at the time. It's still pretty brutal ;-) Conclusions: I would have been happier if I could have a nice hook interface with which i could trap both module includes, and all IO operations and insert my own magic into the mess to aid me in my *DEVELOPMENT* process (not production related at all =) -- () Yuval Kogman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 0xEBD27418 perl hacker & /\ kung foo master: /me sneaks up from another MIME part: neeyah!!!!!
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