Re: [Perlunit-devel] Re: [Perlunit-users] Seeking more info about PerlUnit

[Piers C. <pdc...@bo...>]

Christian Lemburg <le...@ai...> writes:

> Matthias Ferber <mf...@hi...> writes:
>
>> Hi folks,
>> 
>> This seems to be a near-dead mailing list, but perhaps still the best way
>> to contact the minds behind PerlUnit.  So, tally-ho.  (There does seem to
>> be activity on SourceForge, so I'm hopeful that I'm not yelling into a
>> vacuum here.) 
>
> No you are not - but the main activity is happening on perlunit-devel.
>
>> I'm leading a rather optimistic covert effort to popularize JUnit and
>> friends in my company's development environment.  We use both Java and
>> Perl, which makes PerlUnit an attractive variant.  I've been playing with
>> it over the last few days and I like it, but the available docs don't
>> supply a lot of context for gauging where it is. 
>> 
>> My main question is, can you give me any vague idea of how stable you feel
>> PerlUnit is at this point?  I'd like very much to put it to active use at
>> work to some extent.  It's clearly still well in the development stage, so
>> I understand that anything I do with it is At My Own Risk.  But I'm hoping
>> that if this is a really bad idea at this point because everything is
>> going to change completely, someone will wave me off, at least. 
>
> Well, let's put it that way: nearly all of the email that I have
> received and a lot of the posts on perlunit-devel seem to indicate
> that people do already use PerlUnit at work.
>
> I don't think that everything is going to change completely, but you
> might have a word about that with the folks on perlunit-devel. Still,
> the basic idea is to provide an implementation of the XUnit framework
> for Perl, and that is relatively stable. Do you have any specific
> things you are worried about?

Actually, we're in the process of changing the interface quite a bit:
All those Test::Unit::TestFoo type classes are tending to become
Test::Unit::Foo type classes for instance. We're also trying to work
out how to rename Test::Unit::TestHarness and Test::Unit::HarnessTest
to something a little less confusing. Test::Unit is now
Test::Unit::Procedural and Test::Unit is just a place holder for docs
pointing the reader at the 'real' classes. There's a whole bunch of
stuff in /docs/TODO on the HEAD CVS branch which points at what will
be changing for a 1.0 release (which is looking unlikely before
Christmas unless I get my finger out)

Hopefully the changes are actually going to lead to an easier to use,
easier to understand PerlUnit (for instance, the latest version in CVS
has a working 'assert_equals' that does the right thing in most cases.
Which is nice...)

>> My second question is whether you're interested in feedback from
>> whatever there is of a user community, i.e. (as far as I know) me.
>> I have a couple of minor suggestions based on a couple of days of
>> use that I'd be happy to toss up if anyone is interested.
>
> Oh yes, very interested. Please join the perlunit-devel mailing list
> or just keep posting to this list (perlunit-users), and mail us your
> comments and criticisms. Feedback is always welcome.

Absolutely. The new docs even have a 'FEEDBACK' section essentially
asking anyone who uses the framework to let us know and tell us of any
niggles they have (or even things that they really like so we know
what to leave alone.)

-- 
Piers

   "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a language in
    possession of a rich syntax must be in need of a rewrite."
         -- Jane Austen?