Hi Eloy,
On Dec 3, 2008, at 12:46 AM, Eloy Duran wrote:
Hi listees,
The critical question, then, is how to create an environment that
allows
(nay, encourages!) frameworks to be created, tested, polished,
documented,
indexed, shared, etc. My intuition is that GitHub should be part
of this,
because it promotes free-flowing cooperation, merging, etc.
However, I'm
quite sure that GitHub isn't the entire solution. So, ideas are
welcome!
I personally think the most important thing to do first is the
testing part.
Since the main part of MacRuby is written in (Objective-)C,
I expect the most user contribution in the HotCocoa part.
But with the current state of the code this encourages code without
tests,
and who is ever going to go back and write tests for them?
Also, because HotCocoa is probably the part most users will
contribute on,
it should be easy for a user to do so in a cycle like below and not
have to worry
about introducing a regression (or worse, worry so much that they
won't take the effort to create a patch at all):
get source -> run tests -> write tests -> implement feature -> run
tests again -> create patch
This workflow is good for the user because she/he doesn't need to
read all source first
to make sure they don't break anything else.
But also for the devs who are going to commit the patches.
And tests are also useful as examples on how to use the code.
I agree HotCocoa should be covered by tests, at least to catch
regressions.
HotCocoa was initially started as an experiment and we (well, Rich)
iterated a lot on the interface, now it's maybe time to start thinking
about freezing some parts of the API (most probably the mappings) and
covering these with tests would be a good idea.
I think that most contributions will be mapping files.
So I would vote for rewriting HotCocoa in a TDD manner,
which isn't too hard with the majority of the functionality already
fleshed out.
I disagree on this point, why would you want to rewrite the existing
code instead of just covering it with tests? This sounds like a bad
idea to me.
I know this violates the TDD principle but we could simply make sure
the already-written functionality is covered with tests.
I know I'm quite alone on the stance about TDD etc on this list, so
I need to put my money where my mouth is.
Thus I have started experimenting with mspec (since we'll need it
anyways) and rewrote some parts of HotCocoa.
However this was purely "playing" time, meaning I'll throw away that
code and start again now that
I have some experience with all code involved.
After that would come a testing facility for HotCocoa apps.
Which I would probably create in a manner to work with both Rucola
and HotCocoa.
(Probably by re-using some stuff of Rucola::TestCase.)
I expect to really start work at this and committing the end of this
week/next week.
So there's plenty of time left for discussion on this topic.
While this is all interesting, please do not commit anything to trunk
before we discuss this idea together.
Also, I am a bit suspicious when it comes to the rspec syntax. I
personally would prefer the shoulda or pure test/unit syntax.
Laurent
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