Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] Re: equery refactorization

["Douglas Anderson" <dja@gendja.com>]

On Sun, Dec 7, 2008 at 12:02 PM, Michael A. Smith <michael@smith-li.com> wrote:
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> Regarding gentoolkit/trunk/src/equery/tests
>
> I discovered all the test kit that's in equery, and have been refactoring
> 'em.
> They're written in bash, not python, so they're a candidate for some kind of
> python unit testing. Right now, however, that's not a priority for me, so
> I'm
> just making the bash cleaner and hopefully faster and more maintainable. I
> think it'll be helpful as we refactor.
>
> The question is, how maintainable are the "help" tests? These are tests that
> try to confirm that the --help output of each module is correct. I think it
> might be more work than it's worth to try to maintain those...
>
> Thoughts?

I know some people like to write the tests and then write the code to
match, but I don't think it's a good idea for you to refactor the
tests as I'm refactoring the codebase :)

Especially since I'm chopping and moving things, renaming functions,
etc, as long as I think it'll help in the long term.

I even changed the format of the help output ;) Why? Because we have
two user-oriented tools with a similar "modular" design, equery and
eselect, and yet they have a totally different naming scheme and
behave quite differently. It's unnecessarily confusing so I tried to
make them more uniform (I'll upload some code shortly). I always
though equery's --help was cluttered and confusing. A complete
overview is what `man equery' is for, IMHO.

I also changed the way equery handles input slightly. For example this
I think is unnecessarily lenient and in the end confusing, because it
goes against what most other tools do (raise an exception):

$ equery -q -i list mozilla-firefox
!!! unknown global option -i, reusing as local option

So, I don't think we should be working on the tests until we have most
of the code refactored, but I re-extend my invitation for help on that
because there's quite a bit to do!

-Doug