On Friday, 4 August 2017 10:01:28 CEST Richard W.M. Jones wrote: > You asked me to reply to some other points (copied from > https://www.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2017-July/msg00189.html): > > > Sure. OTOH, we already do use oUnit2, so these reasonings were already > > discussed in the past, and (considered we have tests based on oUnit2) > > deemed not a problem. > > I don't think that every past decision should be unchangable.
I agree, but there should be reasons to switch back, since we already invested into this. > > What I still don't understand is why adding a new test based on oUnit2 > > would be a problem, while the rest of the tests are fine as they are. > > I think we should remove oUnit tests and replace them with asserts. And I strongly beg to disagree here. Also, I don't understand why this idea is brought to the table at this point, after I reply (to the limit of annoyingly poking) to get more information about it. When I proposed using oUnit I asked about it, it was deemed good, and then implemented. I don't see why reversing it should be done in a subtle way like this. > But it's not of such critical importance that we need to do that right > now, or even soon. However adding more oUnit tests means adding more > tests which can't be run unless you have oUnit installed. As I already wrote, the availability of oUnit is not a problem at all, and neither is its weight. > > > If packagers don't have it and they run the tests then the oUnit2 > > > tests are skipped (see ‘if HAVE_OCAML_PKG_OUNIT’ in the makefiles). > > > > Packagers rarely run our unit tests, since they make the build times > > much longer, even on fast builders. (Not to mention that sometimes > > they use VMs, and thus this adds more issues to that.) Even in Fedora > > the general test suite is disabled, only `make quickcheck` is run. > > This means it is mostly us developers (or CI) building and testing the > > full test suite. > > [Although it's incidental to this, I should say that in Fedora the > full test suite is enabled, it's just run in two different places (not > Koji because of the complexity and time involved running it in Koji). OK, but still Fedora falls into the "has oUnit" category, and it's even maintained by you. > ‘make check-release’ is run when the tarball is built, and ‘make > installcheck’ is run manually by me after the package has been built.] Both operations are run by whoever does the release, which is you (using Fedora, and thus with oUnit available). > > Regarding the availability: oUnit2 is available in the latest stable > > versions of all the major distros, even in older versions. > > > > > A simpler test framework which didn't use an external dependency > > > wouldn't be skipped. > > > > Surely I'm not an expert OCaml hacker, but at least to me oUnit2 does > > not seem that complex, and a manually written framework would end up > > reimplementing most of it, in the end. > > If you compare an oUnit test: > > > https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/blob/master/common/mlutils/c_utils_unit_tests.ml > > to an assert test: > > > https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/blob/master/daemon/daemon_utils_tests.ml > > There is barely any difference to me. This is my point really: oUnit > doesn't bring any particular benefit. Just few points that come into my mind: - better reporting for expected/got values - better interaction for exceptions (e.g. expect/don't expect one) - logging - possibility to run stuff in subprocesses (which we don't use, although I used it on something private) - possibility to run only some of the tests, which greatly helps debugging the failure of one All those thigs at least help _me_ when debugging tests, and as such they provide value to me. Sure, all the above things can be done manually; what would be the gain though, other basically rewriting oUnit? -- Pino Toscano
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