[Rubygems-developers] The path to Environmentally Clean Test

[Jim Weirich]

I feel like the EPA, espousing environmental protection and all that :-)

I'm working on getting the tests to run cleanly without referencing the 
normal desktop environment.  This is important because (a) we want the 
tests to test what is in the working directory, not the installed 
version of RubyGems, and (b) when you have dependencies on the 
environment, the tests will run differently on different machines.

So, here's a quick summary of the changes I just committed.

(1) The rake file used to use a library function to run the tests. 
Since Rake can be a gem, it may need to run require_gem to get to its 
library.  Unfortunately require_gem is what we are testing, so we can't 
depend upon it working.  So I moved the rake library function to a 
scripts directory and updated the Rakefile to run the tests "inline". 
Thus, better separation between test and environment.

(NOTE:  Normally Rake runs in its own Ruby "VM" and there is no problem. 
  In the unit tests, the library code (using the installed gem) needed 
to be loaded in the same VM as the test code (using the non-installed 
VM).  Did that make sense?)

(2) The next big environment dependency are the gem directories where 
stuff is installed.  This is controlled by Gem.dir and $GEM_PATH and are 
calculated at load time (well, $GEM_PATH at least).  I changed $GEM_PATH 
to Gem.path everywhere in the code, and made both calculated upon 
demand.  I also added a GEM_HOME environment variable.

Gem.dir is the directory where installs will take place.  There is a 
default value (in the ruby dist directory), but if you give a value for 
GEM_PATH, it will be used instead.  This allows our tests to target 
installs into temp directories without messing up installed stuff.

Gem.path is a list of gem directories to search for gems.  It should 
include Gem.dir (usually as the last entry).  If you set the RUBY_GEMS 
environment variable with a path-style list, this list will be used for 
Gem.path.  The Gem.dir directory will be appended to the list if it is 
not already there.

Tests have been added for Gem.dir/Gem.path.  If this behavior doesn't 
make sense, we can easily change it.

Oh, Gem.clear_paths and Gem.use_paths are provided for making testing 
easier.  Gem.clear_paths clears the Gem.dir and Gem.path values so that 
the next time they are needed they will be recalculated from scratch. 
Gem.use_path(home, path_list) allows us to set the Gem.dir and Gem.path 
values directly in a unit test without mucking around with environment 
variables.

This is just the start to enable Environment clean testing.  We need to 
start using them now.  At least *two* tests are still environmentally 
sensitive because they were failing until I installed the latest CVS, 
then they started passing (they were remote installer related).

Finally, just one more thing.

For some reason 'assert_raise' doesn't work on my system, but 
'assert_raises' does.  Is the is Test::Unit compatibility thing?  I'm 
not sure.

-- 
-- Jim Weirich    jim at weirichhouse.org     http://onestepback.org
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"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct,
not tried it." -- Donald Knuth (in a memo to Peter van Emde Boas)