[rspec-devel] [Proposed Refactoring] - Current ExampleSpace class subclasses

[Ian Dees]

Quoth the many:

> > I know that its not NIH. Its frustration about how difficult it is to
> > extend rspec. People want simplicity.

Hmmm.  Bending and extending RSpec in a couple of
we-probably-shouldn't ways hasn't been that nasty for us in my day
job.  But then again, we're not using it to test Rails apps; that's
probably a whole other level of complexity.

The biggest problems we encountered were method names/signatures
moving out from under us after an upgrade---which we fully expected,
since we weren't using the publicly documented interfaces.

In some cases RSpec later implemented stuff we had been tacking
awkwardly on, so we were able to add functionality by removing our own
code.  Gotta love that.

> > > Additions to Test::Unit would simply work. Having a Test::Unit runner
> > > would arguably lead to a simpler codebase.

How?  Wouldn't that introduce a dependency on Test::Unit?

> > > It would be kinda nice if there were a good plugin architecture to either
> > > Test::Unit or Rspec.

That's a really good idea---my work colleagues and I could make our
current hacks a little more future-proof, and the folks who (for some
reason) like Test::Unit can find a way to make the two play nicely
together.

I guess I just don't understand the recent rash of "we're abandoning
RSpec" or "we're coding the next great RSpec alternative" blog posts.
I suppose software inevitably runs into things it just can't do well
as its user base increases.

But for us, over a year after we started looking at this thing, the
bloom is still firmly on the rose.

--Ian