[Http-webtest-general] Re: HTTP-WebTest looking pretty solid now

[Ilya M. <il...@ma...>]

>>>>> On Wed, 19 Jun 2002 23:01:46 -0700, "Richard Anderson" <ri...@ri...> said:

RA> Hi Ilya.  After looking though the Changes log, it looks like
RA> version 1.99_* has had a good amount of real-world use and a lot
RA> of the obvious bugs have been fixed.  Maybe it's time to strip off
RA> the comment "THIS IS A BETA VERSION THAT IS A REWRITE OF VERSION
RA> 1.07 ..." from the docs?  When do you think it should be released
RA> as 2.0.0?

Then only thing stops me from releasing 2.0 is my plans to broke some
backward compatibility (with previous 1.99_xx releases). It is very
likely that I will made one more 1.99_xx release which does that and
unless there will be found any serious bugs it will be last 1.99_xx
release.

RA> After trying Parse::RecDescent, what is your opinion of it?  Are
RA> there any circumstances where you might use it for some other
RA> problem?

I dropped Parse::RecDescent because at some point I just could not get
it to report parsing errors correctly with last wtscript format
change. Moreover my previous (successful) attempts to make
Parse::RecDescent to do what I wanted it to to wasted a lot of my
time. When I rewrote parser in pure perl it took very small fraction
of time I've spent on Parse::RecDescent.

Would I use Parse::RecDescent in other projects? Well, I don't
know. Parse::RecDescent is powerful tool but it seems to be overkill
for simple grammars (wtscript grammar is definitely is quite
simple).

RA> As I recall, the default value of apache_options used to be -X,
RA> which seemed reasonable.  Why did you change this or is it not
RA> documented?

-X is implied now. You do not have to pass it via apache_options. The
reason for this change is that actualy HTTP::WebTest cannot work
correctly in local testing mode if Apache was started without this
parameter.

RA> I notice an item in TODO about cleaning up the code for local testing.  I
RA> always suspected that this was one of the least used options in the module.
RA> Have you ever received any queries / bug reports for this function?

Never. I highly suspect that actually nearly nobody uses this
option. Frankly even I've never used it myself with exception when I
was testing HTTP::WebTest::Plugin::Apache.

RA> Why do you need an error_log parameter?   The location of the error log is
RA> specified in the httpd.conf file in the temp directory that the module
RA> creates, so the error log will always be in the temp directory unless the
RA> user edits the module's httpd.conf file.

Well, it is needed because of ignore_error_log parameter. In general
case you may want to watch error log even if you don't run
HTTP-WebTest in local test mode. In this case there is no way how
HTTP-WebTest can deduce path to error_log.

Anyway in local test mode HTTP-WebTest does DWIM and error_log get's
"correct" default value.

RA> The docs say the allowed values of method are GET and PUT.  This
RA> should be GET and POST, yes?

Yes. Thanks for noticing it. To be fair I have never tried to do
through POD docs review so there are definetely some quirks in them.

It would be nice if someone volunteered to do this work. No matter how
hard I try my English will be always imperfect (live along technical
inaccuracies like this one).

-- 
Ilya Martynov (http://martynov.org/)