[naviserver-devel] nsdsh - NaviServer shell for testing

[Stephen D. <sd...@gm...>]

Neither RedHat or Fedora ship with a threaded build of Tcl, so I build
my own package and install in parallel with the original.  I've been
naming the tclsh84 executable nsdsh.

Our tests, such as they are, also need to run in a threaded Tcl shell.
 Which one? How to find it?  Maybe we should build an nsdsh which
would load libnsd.so by default and link to the correct Tcl libs.

It's also currently quite difficult to test certain aspects of the
server.  e.g. for cookie handling you really want a connection
available, but making actual network connections in a test environment
seems a little fragile.  So I thought maybe the nsdsh could provide
extra testing hooks.

It could take a '-t' option on the command line and load a standard
server config file, using it to more fully emulate a running server
than the current libnsd does.  With this option present, stdin could
be the request stream, stdout the response, and stderr the log file? 
It might register some extra _ns_debug_* commands?

I'm not sure what the right way to go here is.  Would such an nsdsh be
useful, or should we just add more to the server binary, or should I
just be a bit more creative when writing tests..?