Good day everyone
I few notes on the forthcoming release of Rivet 3.3.0
The release of Rivet 3.3.0 is a bit trickier than usual: the twofold
support for Tcl8.6 and Tcl9.0 and the entirely reformed test suite in
order to have it working under an utf-8 based locale.
...and then the AI assistants issue broke out on the scene
The test suite was reworked with the support of an AI assistant. I tried
to follow a manageable and responsible conduct in making use of the
assistant, demanding tasks to be performed in reviewable installments of
changes and challenging the assistant every time something wasn't clear
or didn't fit my vision of a problem
The assistant was chiefly tasked with the revision of tests involving
non-ASCII characters represented in the iso-8859-1 (latin1) encoding.
There's an inherent danger of creating truisms when writing tests. AI
agents too do sometimes fall into these logical traps. I spotted a
couple of them reviewing the tests of another project
(https://github.com/mxmanghi/tclcurl-ng)
In the process of the test revision the assistant pointed out that an
existing test (in cookies.test) was fundamentally wrong because it set
cookies values with non ASCII characters, which breaks the standards
(Apache was forgiving in this respect)
In another case a test variable left behind shadowed the outcome of a
subsequent test that fundamentally was to fail, but in practice it did
not because the leftover confused the result. A future task for the
assistant will be to structure the tests and ensure orderly and
consistent resource cleanup
I am usually able to persuade the assistant about the approach to follow
when approaching a problem (I know...they're sycophants). In the case of
safely transmitting binary data I wanted to have it handled at the Tcl
level, but OpenAI/codex was adamant in the determination of having the
new commands implemented at the C level. I consented and they turned out
so simple and straightforward that I eventually accepted its solution
I would be happy if someone else could review the work done, especially
when it comes the data encoding.
happy conferencing for those in Vienna
-- Massimo
P.S. I don't write message using AI assistants: it would be like asking
someone to do downhill skying on behalf of me. I not a pro at skying but
I like it, and I'm not a native English speaker but I like to write
messages myself. Mistakes included
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