[Libguestfs] [PATCH 06/27] daemon: Add unit tests of the ‘Utils’ module.

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Thu, Jul 20, 2017 at 09:48:52AM +0200, Pino Toscano wrote:
> On Wednesday, 19 July 2017 16:33:39 CEST Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 02:29:33PM +0200, Pino Toscano wrote:
> > > On Wednesday, 19 July 2017 14:21:51 CEST Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > > > On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 12:57:08PM +0200, Pino Toscano wrote:
> > > > > Would it be possible to use oUnit too?
> > > > 
> > > > I'm not clear on what benefit oUnit gives us which is worth the extra
> > > > dependency it pulls in.
> > > 
> > > I was referring to OUnit2, which we already have an optional dependency
> > > for almost all the OCaml tests.
> > 
> > Sure, understood.  But what would we lose by converting those to
> > simple programs that just ran a series of "assert"s?  If a single
> > test fails we have to fix it anyway.
> 
> The assert means that you will just get the failure, and you will need
> to edit the test just to see what was the actual failure.  Sure, it is
> doable, but it adds extra steps to debugging.
> 
> > If the lack of oUnit2 means that other users are skipping
> > those tests, oUnit2 may be a negative.
> 
> I'm not sure I follow this.  We already implemented in the past tests
> using OUnit (then converted to OUnit2), which means we sort of agreed
> to use a (relatively simple) unit test framework.  Most of the OCaml
> tests use it already, so the logic that follows here would be to keep
> using it.
> 
> If the problem is "this test is already sent for review as series of
> assert", then I can volunteer to rewrite it to OUnit2.  Otherwise,
> I'd like to know what are the reasons against using something that
> already discussed in the past, approved, and established.

My reasoning is that oUnit2 is optional.  If packagers don't have
it and they run the tests then the oUnit2 tests are skipped
(see ‘if HAVE_OCAML_PKG_OUNIT’ in the makefiles).

A simpler test framework which didn't use an external dependency
wouldn't be skipped.

Rich.

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