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Re: Running ert tests on buffers in rst.el and elsewhere


From: Christian Ohler
Subject: Re: Running ert tests on buffers in rst.el and elsewhere
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2012 00:37:36 +0200

Stefan Merten, 2012-06-18:

I wanted to test functions which operate on buffers - i.e. use buffer
content as input and possibly modify the buffer. Buffer includes point
and mark in this case. Since I found no support for this requirement
in the ert package I wrote some support code for it.

I only glanced at your code so far, but please do take a look at the current version of ERT, in particular the utility functions in ert-x.el and the way ert-x-tests.el uses them.

Some preliminary notes:

Is it true that your code covers two features, one about turning buffer content, point and mark into a data structure and back as well as comparing such data structures, the other about providing input to interactive functions like completing-read?

The function `ert-run-test-with-buffer' combines both features, and I don't think that's a good thing; it would be better to have a more primitive function `ert-run-with-interactive-inputs' (or similar) that doesn't do any of the buffer management, and let the programmer combine that function with `ert-with-test-buffer' and `ert-Buf-to-buffer' as appropriate.

Similarly, `ert-compare-test-with-buffer' looks like it checks a bunch of things that should probably be left as separate `should' forms on the caller's side.

With functions like `ert-equal-buffer', your code introduces a notion of equality of buffers, and its definition seems somewhat arbitrary, so I'm not sure it's a good one. For example, it doesn't take buffer-local variables or markers into account. It should be easy to avoid the question of what the right notion of buffer equality is by letting the programmer extract ert-Buf data structures from buffers and compare those in `should' forms with some equality predicate.

However, compared to the existing approach as used in the tests `ert-test-run-tests-interactively-2' and `ert-test-describe-test', your buffer handling functions add the ability to test the position of point and mark, while sacrificing the ability to test text properties (and thus font locking). From a high-level perspective, testing point and mark looks like a small feature on top of testing buffer content, so I'm not sure it justifies as much additional machinery as your code seems to add; we should look for ways to simplify things.

As a first step, could make the two features (providing interactive input and handling buffer content) orthogonal and send separate patches, perhaps simplifying the buffer content code after looking at how it's done in ert-x-tests.el?


The next step I considered was to support testing font locking - or
may be text properties in general. However, I didn't start this yet.
It certainly would be useful.

ert-x.el does have features related to this, see `ert-propertized-string' and `ert-equal-including-properties'. ERT's self-tests make use of them.

Christian.




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