[ruby-core:67370] Re: Future of test suites for Ruby

On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 5:25 PM, Tanaka Akira <[e-mail]> wrote:
> I like a smaller test framework.
> mspec is larger than our minitest4-based one.

That is indeed true, and mspec may be more of a barrier to running the
tests than minitest (e.g. for new implementations). However, there's a
lot of helper logic in MRI's tests that also make it hard for new
impls to run the tests.

That could be fixed more easily than simplifying mspec, I would guess.

> Ruby implementation is sometimes broken.
> Larger test framework tends to cause a problem (such as SEGV) in the
> test framework itself.
> It is difficult to invesitigate the problem for larger test framework.
> I'm tired for this situtation until Ruby 1.8 which use old test/unit
> (ancestor of test-unit gem).
> I'm happy in this aspect since Ruby 1.9.

It would be helpful if the entire suite used only minitest4 but it
appears some suites use test/unit. It would also have been nice for
minitest to stay compatible :-( Is there interest in making the test
suite minitest5 compatible, since we have removed minitest from
stdlib?

> RubySpec uses "should" style which is not recommended by RSpec now.
> http://myronmars.to/n/dev-blog/2012/06/rspecs-new-expectation-syntax
> I guess people familiar with "should" syntax will decrease.

Good point. I have no preference for one over the other.

> Changing a tool is not enough for readabiliy.
> Who wrote hard-to-read tests in a tool will still write hard-to-read
> tests in another tool.

Very good point. Some of these things are hard to test.

> Some kind of feedback for hard-to-read tests should be considered to
> address readability.
> It is a long way to go, regardless of a tool.
> If such feedback is not designed, changing a tool causes more trouble
> than benefits.

This is actually very insightful. Tom and I were chatting about this
yesterday, and it seems like one of the first steps would be adopting
an official coding standard for tests. That would cover new tests and
give the community a clear path toward fixing the existing tests.

Is there an official ruby-core style guide for Ruby code?

- Charlie