Re: [Expectperl-discuss] Expect 1.30 - change in behavior

[Gabor S. <ga...@sz...>]

Hi Roland and list!

I've just release 1.31 in which I've tried to fix some of the newly added
test that failed randomly.
As I don't really have an immediate need for Expect (just when I teach Test
automation I like to tech Expect as well),
so for now I think my main focus will be to clean up the test to reduce the
failures. Some of the new tests fail in very strange
and unexpected ways. If any of you have time it would be great if you could
take a look at the tests. I added some comments
explaining the issues and linking to reports.

With that said, I think it would be nice to collect the thoughts from the
people here and especially from you Roland,
on how that future Expect2 might be designed. Even if we don't start to
implement it now, I think it would be worth
putting together a document.
Roland, please don't spare me from your design ideas. If nothing else, I'll
put them in a file in the expect.pm repository.

Regarding IO::Pty, I am not sure. As I can see Todd Rinaldo has released a
version in May 2014, but he has not touched it since then.
I don't even know what it is supposed to do. So give me a co-maint bit and
we'll see :)

regards
   Gabor


On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 6:11 PM, Roland Giersig <rgi...@cp...> wrote:

> As the (mostly retired) maintainer and co-author of Expect I'd like to add
> some thoughts and explanations:
>
> The non-OOP interface was the original one, crafted after the Tcl/Tk
> version of Expect and designed to make the move from Tcl/Tk to Perl as
> straight as possible. I did have some support requests for the non-OOP
> version, so people did use it but I have no idea how large demand for that
> is nowadays.
>
> Still, some people might use it so I would vote for leaving it in Expect,
> patching only the most pressing bugs and move the OOP version to Expect2 to
> become the official version that gets full improvement support. Maintenance
> for Expect should be kept at a minimum, only fixing real urgent bugs and
> checking that it runs under new versions of Perl. All enhancement requests
> should be directed to Expect2.
>
> I have some design ideas how the Expect engine should look internally (it
> is a mess now) but never had time to implement that. Should anyone want to
> take a shot at that, please contact me.
>
> Gabor, thanks for taking over and investing your time!
> BTW, most problems that crop up as Expect support requests are related to
> some pseudoterminal stuff in IO::Pty, so if you want to also take that
> over, Gabor... :-)
>
> Best regards, Roland
>
>
>
> 2014-08-25 11:43 GMT+02:00 Gabor Szabo <ga...@sz...>:
>
>> Hi Salvador,
>>
>> thanks for your reply, I hope it is ok that I send my reply back to the
>> mailing list as this is the interest of all the people who might be
>> subscribed.
>>
>> If you are talking about the change I Implemented in 1.30, that's while
>> changing backward compatibility of the code the behavior was actually
>> incorrect and buggy earlier. I really hope people have not relied on that
>> behavior. Maybe I could add some warnings if I notice people rely on it
>> and point them to some explanation how to fix it. (Thinking aloud: have a
>> flag that will indicate if the latest call to ->expect was successful or not
>> and if the user calls ->after or ->match when the last expect was
>> unsuccessful  it will give a warning and a pointer to the explanation.
>>
>> If you meant the elimination of the non-OOP way, actually I have no idea
>> how that could be even used today. I don't recall seeing any example with
>> such code and based on the documentation and reading the source code I
>> could not come up with an example so far. So I am not sure if that's even
>> in use.
>> That's why I was asking for help.
>>
>> Something like Expect2 might be a good idea, I'll give it some thought.
>>
>> Gabor
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 12:00 PM, Salvador Fandino <sfa...@ya...>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Hi Gabor
>>>
>>> >________________________________
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> > From: Gabor Szabo <ga...@sz...>
>>> >To: exp...@li...
>>> >Sent: Friday, August 22, 2014 12:06 PM
>>> >Subject: [Expectperl-discuss] Expect 1.30 - change in behavior
>>>
>>> >
>>> >
>>> >
>>> >Hi
>>> >
>>> >
>>> >version 1.30 is on CPAN now. It has a change in behavior correcting a
>>> bug.
>>> >From now on ->after and ->match will return undef if the last call to
>>> ->expect has failed.
>>> >
>>> >
>>> >(Earlier they returned the information from the last successful expect)
>>> >
>>> >
>>> >Please check if your code still works after the upgrade!
>>> >
>>> >
>>> >
>>> >
>>> >I also have a question: Do you know any code that uses the Expect module
>>> >in a non OOP-way?  If yes, I'd urgently need examples. Otherwise I am
>>> going to
>>> >remove this feature.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Expect is often used by sys-admins with limited Perl skills, who only
>>> program occasionally and who write ugly and weak code that is very sensible
>>> to minor changes. The module has been "stable" for a long time, so, are you
>>> sure it is a good idea to perform mayor changes on it and even remove
>>> features? it may break lots of code.
>>>
>>>
>>> Wouldn't it be better to fork it into another module (Expect2)? That
>>> would give you the freedom to redo it to your liking, without worrying too
>>> much about backward compatibility.
>>>
>>> Note that I don't want to discourage you in any way. I am very pleased
>>> to see you working on getting it on shape!
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>


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