[darcs-users] darcs patch: Do not use Perl test harness. (and 3 more)

[Trent W. Buck]

"David Roundy" <daveroundy at gmail.com> writes:

> On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 3:29 PM, Matthias Kilian <kili at outback.escape.de> wrote:
>> On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 11:21:07AM -0400, David Roundy wrote:
>>> I'd rather see a sh-compatible tool written in haskell with builtin
>>> grep  etc.  A friend is working on  one, and I'm willing to wait  a
>>> few weeks to see how it progresses.  It's very nice being able to copy
>>> from the tests into  my bash shell when trying  to figure out what's
>>> going  wrong.
>>
>> What do you gain by reimplementing your already existing unix user
>> space in Haskell? If you want to drop snippets of tests into your
>> shell, you would have to ensure the Haskell reimplementation (e.g.
>> the builtin grep) behaves exactly like our standard grep (be it GNU
>> grep or whatever),
>
> No, it wouldn't have to be exact, since we would only be using the
> bash shell for tracking down actual bugs in darcs.
>
>> IMHO, we've repaired many of the portability issues in the test
>> scripts in a timely manner, and thanks to the build bots, we see
>> new breakage in time, too (and can fix them). I'm really willing
>> to contribute to this in the future -- after all, I'm doing much
>> more shell scripting than Haskell programming ;-)
>
> I just think it's a waste of time continually chasing after bugs in
> the test scripts, and writing contorted and ugly test scripts in order
> to be portable.  More compact tests are easier to write and easier to
> run.

And easier to understand.  When I look at some of the darcs tests, I
can't tell whether the script does a dumb thing because the author
didn't know any better, or because the obvious way isn't portable.  For
example, it would never have occurred to me that "fgrep" might work on a
system where "grep -F" does not.

> And it would allow windows tests to be run by that large fraction of
> users who are unwilling to install msys or cygwin.

Is this the only impeediment to Windows users running the tests?  I'm on
Debian and I never bother to run the functional tests, because I expect
the buildbots to do that for me.