BuildMaster Surgery - Moving to rSpec

This is the first part of the BuildMaster surgery that I have just finished (well, 95%) that have been keeping me up late every day. I will write the second part as a separate blog.

Moving BuildMaster to rSpec turned out to be not as smoothly as I hoped. Hopefully this blog will help anyone who is interested on similar task. This is what I have figured out so far so if there is a better way of doing it do let me know.

Syntax Change

If you have tons of test/unit scripts already, changing the code to use the rSpec syntax could be boring. They do have "Test::Unit Migration" support. However, I didn't get to take full advantage. It just generated "migration error" with no detail information for me. So I had to use some regular expressions to get the most of the change done, which I have blogged in "Going rSpec".

Specification Sharing

The "Context API" document on rSpec teaches you how to call helper methods in your specification code. However, it does not show you how you can make two context share the specifications, which is very useful if you want to make sure that two different implementation of the same interface shares the exact same behaviors.

Brain from Pivotal showed me that you can achieve this by using 'extend' (instead of include). So you can write the common behavior specifications in one file:

module CottaSpecifications

def register_cotta_file_specifications
  setup do
  # this one uses the @system that will be set up by each implementation spec setup
  @file = BuildMaster::CottaFile.new(@system, Pathname.new('dir/file.txt'))
end

specify 'file can be created with system and pathname' do
  @file.name.should_equal 'file.txt'
end
end

Then you can include those common behavior in your specification file for the implementation:

require 'cotta_file_specifications'
module BuildMaster
context 'Cotta file' do
  # extending the module so that you can call the methods
  extend CottaSpecifications
  setup do
  # setup the implementation for specifications
  @system = InMemorySystem.new
end

# this call registers all the spefications
register_cotta_file_specifications
end
end

Hopefully the above code makes sense to you. If not, let me know.


Running All Specifications

Again, thanks Brain to explain the reason and provided me with a solution.

Somehow, all the registered contexts are run at the end of each context registration. So my code for loading all the tests will now make the same context run again and again:

If you have context A and B in tc_a.rb and tc_b.rb and you require each file one by one. After "require 'tc_a'", the specifications in Context A will run. After "require 'tc_b'", the specifications in Context B will run, this time ALONG with all the specification in Context A. If you have C, D, etc., then specifications of Context A will run again and again at the end of each following require.

So Brain wrote his own specification runner, which will hold off the execution until all the contexts are loaded:

require 'rubygems'
require 'spec'
#require 'diff/lcs'
dir = File.dirname(__FILE__)
#require "#{dir}/../test/common_test_case"
require 'test/unit'
Test::Unit.run = true

args = ARGV.dup
unless args.include?("-f") || args.include?("--format")
  args << "--format"
  args << "specdoc"
end
#args << "--diff"
args << $0
$context_runner  = ::Spec::Runner::OptionParser.create_context_runner(args, false, STDERR, STDOUT)

def run_context_runner_if_necessary(system_exit, has_run)
  return if system_exit && !(system_exit.respond_to?(:success?) && system_exit.success?)
  return if has_run
  exit context_runner.run(true)
end

at_exit do
  has_run = !context_runner.instance_eval {@reporter}.instance_eval {@start_time}.nil?
  run_context_runner_if_necessary($!, has_run)
end

To use this, all I needed to do was to require this file at the beginning of my "ts_buildmaster.rb" file.

And it generates nice output too:

...
Directory object with cotta for in memory system
...
- dir should return sub directory
- dir should return a directory from a relative pathname
- should get file in current directory
- should create dir and its parent
- should delete dir and its children
- should do nothing if dir already exists
- should list dirs

Directory object with cotta for physical system
...
- dir should return sub directory
- dir should return a directory from a relative pathname
- should get file in current directory
- should create dir and its parent
- should delete dir and its children
- should do nothing if dir already exists
- should list dirs
...