From: Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@...>
Date: 2002-11-05T20:39:01+09:00
Subject: Re: Debugging and Test::Unit - good news

From: "Gavin Sinclair" <gsinclair@soyabean.com.au>


> From: <coma_killen@fastmail.fm>
>
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > I often find I want to step through my test code
> > with the debugger. But using Test::Unit and invoking
> > the debugger as
> >
> > ruby -r debug example_test.rb
> >
> > and setting a breakpoint on the line I want to start
> > debugging on don't work; the debugger simply
> > finished without breaking.
> >
> > How can I deal with that?
>
> Good timing.  I'm maintaing a list of debugger problems at
>
>   http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RubyDebuggerProblems
>
> This is a known problem, and there's no (yet) known solution.  This is
probably
> because Test::Unit relies on *at_exit* in order to actually run the tests,
and
> perhaps the debugger can't trap things from within at_exit.
>
> Maybe if you defined an explicit test runner within the Test::Unit framework
> this problem would be avoided.  I'll try this as well if it's possible.

This works!

At the bottom of my test file (say the test class is called TC_Foo), I placed
the lines:

  require 'test/unit/ui/console/testrunner'
  Test::Unit::UI::Console::TestRunner.run(TC_Foo)

This runs just the same as if you didn't have it, because the at_exit code
would have run this anyway.  I regard this as a workaround for now, because
although it's not difficult, it's a minor hassle to do this when you want to
debug.

Note: TestUnit seems to run quite slowly under the debugger.  However, the
machine I'm running it on it slow anyway (even though it's a production server)
so YMMV.

Gavin