lisp-unit2

[bobbysmith007]

Howdy and much thanks for the longtime work on this project! This is not really an issue with lisp-unit, but I wanted to notify you in a public way about this work. Feel free to close :)

We (at AccelerationNet) have been using lisp-unit for many years and while it met our needs, we have consistently had small recurring issues, but nothing substantive enough to tackle. We have posted some patches (such as TAP support) in the past.

Recently, after I was getting compiler errors from a unit test, that I couldn't track down, I endeavored to fix many of my troubles with lisp unit as a new derivative library, lisp-unit2. (My compiler error ended up being unrelated to lisp-unit other than LU not helping me find the trouble at all.)

Other things I have changed:

• Debugger support is driven by debugger-hook
• Compile tests immediately upon definition so that compile warnings etc are easily seen at definition time
• with-summary context for printing error messages while the tests run, print-summary for printing the test-result-database
  • It was sometimes ambiguous where an error was coming from because the name of the failing test was below the message.
• Tests now have source locations and so the name of the test can be used to go to the defintion
• TAP output didnt contain useful error messages and now does
• Testing signals is well supported now
• Added a restart when a single test fails to continue running the rest of the suite

These and many other notes are in the readme

I wanted to point out this work, hoping to elicit some feedback, and so that if you saw anything useful, you might backport it to lisp-unit.

I did this as a new project because I wanted to easily load both libraries (I have many projects to convert slowly).

Thanks again for all your efforts and Cheers,
Russ Tyndall, acceleration.net

https://github.com/AccelerationNet/lisp-unit2

[bobbysmith007]

PS: Obviously this is still a work in progress, though I think most of the substantive changes are accomplished

[ThomasHermann]

Thanks for the feedback. It's going to take some time to work through the changes in lisp-unit2 to evaluate how or if those can be incorporated back into lisp-unit. I looked at the code base and the first 2 commits. The immediate thing I noticed is the file organization and the use of external dependencies. There has always been an effort in lisp-unit to keep things simple and one aspect of that goal is the ability to load the core lisp-unit as a single file without ASDF, Quicklisp, or some other system definition. I like that ability despite not using it myself. It puts a constraint on the code base to keep a clear separation between the core lisp-unit functionality and extensions.

As time permits, I'm going to work through your fork and port as many of the useful features as possible. The first thing I need to do, though, is complete the internal testing of the existing code base and release version 1.0. It looks like there have have been quite a few changes in lisp-unit2 during the past month and if that rate of change keeps up, I'm not sure I'll be able to.

Thank you for the feedback and the development.

With respect to this issue, I'm going to keep it open until I run out of lisp-unit2 things to port or until there is a better forum to discuss it. It may be time to create a discussion forum for lisp-unit/lisp-unit2.

[bobbysmith007]

There has always been an effort in lisp-unit to keep things simple and one aspect of that goal is the ability to load the core lisp-unit as a single file without ASDF, Quicklisp, or some other system definition.

I definitely respect the simplicity in lisp-unit and was one of the reasons I used it without much editing for so long. As far as single file, this is definitely not one of the goals of lisp-unit2. Given the lisp environment in 2013 (with quicklisp and asdf being mostly ubiquitous), I did not find it worth while to keep "single file" as a goal. Even so, hopefully the splits that I did are logical enough (as sections moved from the old lisp-unit.lisp file), that I hope it is not too difficult to work through.

For testing, the signals I added allowed me to write meta tests against the lisp-unit example test suite, so that part might be applicable toward your immediate goals of testing lisp-unit.

Cheers and thanks for your comments and continued development.

[ThomasHermann]

Haven't forgotten lisp-unit2, been occupied with other things. There is another lisp-unit proposal that needs to be coordinated with the items brought up in lisp-unit2, so will start devoting some attention to making progress on these items. Thanks.