From: Francis Hwang <sera@...>
Date: 2005-02-16T23:39:49+09:00
Subject: [ANN] FileSystem 0.1.0: Beta for me, Alpha for you

Greetings!

Next down my non-stop pipeline of absolutely necessary libraries that 
only I seem to need: FileSystem, a library that will mock out File, 
FileUtils, Dir, and other file-dependent built-in classes. It aims to 
simulate an entire file-system in memory for the purposes of testing.

http://rubyforge.org/projects/filesystem/

== HOW DOES IT WORK? ==

To use it in live code, you call get methods on the FileSystem module:

   FileSystem.get_dir => Dir
   FileSystem.get_file => File
   FileSystem.get_file_utils => FileUtils
   FileSystem.get_dir.entries( '.' ) => [ '.', '..', 'file1', ... ]

(I'm thinking about adding a voodoo.rb file that actually re-assigns 
the constants Dir, File, and FileUtils, though I suspect this will not 
be that usable in many cases.)

Then, to mock out that activity for a test code, simply call 
FileSystem.mock= :

   FileSystem.mock = true
   FileSystem.get_dir => FileSystem::DirAdapter
   FileSystem.get_file => FileSystem::FileAdapter
   FileSystem.get_file_utils => FileSystem::FileUtilsAdapter
   FileSystem.get_dir.entries( '.' ) => [ '.', '..', ... ]

== HOW COMPLETE IS IT? ==
Oh dear, not at all. Hence the release name: "Beta for me, Alpha for 
you". I am now using it day-to-day, both at Rhizome[1] and my own 
blog-publishing software, Dauxite[2]. So I know it works for me. It 
currently handles basic issues of looking up paths, writing and reading 
files, modification times, etc. It doesn't know anything about 
symlinks, creation times, permissions. I suspect that if you tried to 
mock a Windows system with it, that it would squeal like a 2-year-old.

I'm putting out today's release in hopes of getting bug reports. Please 
file bug reports! Lots and lots of bug reports! Please be specific, 
though. If you file a bug titled "Support Windows, you l4m3r" I won't 
know where to start.

Thanks,
Francis "I'd mock out the air itself if my lungs were hot-swappable" 
Hwang
http://fhwang.net/

[1] Rhizome is the premier online resource in the field of new media 
arts: It gets more than 1 million page views a month and contains the 
world's largest online archive of new media art, at almost 1500 works.
[2] Dauxite is my own idiosyncratic, unreleased software. So it's not 
as heavily tested as Rhizome, but I use it at least once a week, so 
it's a good way to test something like FileSystem.