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CONTRIBUTING.md

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Contributing

Adding A Test

A person who wants to contribute a test to the project should read this Github guide to issues and pull requests (PRs) which describes in great detail the work flow for forks and submitting PRs to a project.

Determine The Purpose

There may be two different purposes to contribute to this project:

  1. Contributors may wish to fix an error or add a test for existing functionality. The latter is often needed when a bug is discovered in a compiler and there is reason to cover this bug with a test.
  2. Contributors may wish to propose a change to the Raku language itself. This kind of contribution should be started by submitting an issue in the problem-solving repository. The issue must be opened using the Report a language problem template. If the proposed change is accepted then a test to cover the new behavior is to be submitted to roast.

Note that in the second case if the proposal is accepted but not implemented yet, the test must be fudged. See Fudged tests below and README) for more details. The preferable way is to use the todo verb because in this case a tester would get notified when a fudged test passes due to a feature being implemented or a bug fixed.

Submission Steps

Follow the same general steps for the Raku roast project:

  • fork the project
  • clone your fork of roast to a local directory
  • set the origin and upstream remotes
  • checkout a branch to work on your issue or proposal
  • when through, ensure all desired commits are finished
  • push the issue branch to your origin (your fork of roast on github)
  • go to your github account for project roast and submit the PR

Working the issue

Normal tests

New tests for existing features are usually accomplished by adding the test(s) to an existing test file. Then that file's plan count is updated. The new test(s) are tested locally by executing

$ raku <test file(s)>

When all is well, the commits are finalized, the branch is pushed to the user's fork on Github, and there the PR is initiated.

If a new test file has been created, one additional step has to be taken: the new test file has to be added to spectest.data. (This file used to live in the Rakudo repo at github.com/rakudo/rakudo but it is part of roast nowadays.) The header of spectest.data is to be carefully examined as the test may require additional marking or other kinds of special care.

Fudged tests

Let's say you want to propose a new feature, method printf for IO::Handle and, being a believer in test-driven development, are submittng some test for something that can't yet be tested. Thus we will need to create the test but we will fudge it so it will be ignored.

We create a new test file named appropriately. Say, S16-io/printf.t, the contents of which are:

use v6;
use Test;
plan 1;

my $f = $*TMPDIR.add('.printf-tmpfil');
my $fh = open $f, :w;
$fh.printf("Hi\n");
$fh.close;
my $res = slurp $f;
is $res, "Hi\n", "printf() works with zero args";
unlink $f;

We know the test doesn't work yet:

$ raku S16-io/printf.t
1..1
No such method 'printf' for invocant of type 'IO::Handle'
  in block <unit> at ./S16-io/printf.t line 9

# Looks like you planned 1 test, but ran 0

so we add the fudge to it to get the new contents:

use v6;
use Test;
plan 1;

#?rakudo skip 'GH #999999 not yet implemented'
{
    my $f = $*TMPDIR.add('.printf-tmpfil');
    my $fh = open $f, :w;
    $fh.printf("Hi\n");
    $fh.close;
    my $res = slurp $f;
    is $res, "Hi\n", "printf() works with zero args";
    unlink $f;
}

Notice we put the test in a block. All tests in that block are affected by the fudge line preceding it.

We want to test the fudged file before we submit the PR so we have to manually create the fudged test file:

$ fudge rakudo S16-io/printf.t
S16-io/printf.rakudo

which, as we see by the return from the command, produces file S16-io/printf.rakudo whose contents are

use v6;
use Test;
plan 1;

#?rakudo skip 'GH #999999 not yet implemented'
skip('GH #999999 not yet implemented', 1);# {
#     my $f = $*TMPDIR.add('.printf-tmpfil');
#     my $fh = open $f, :w;
#     $fh.printf("Hi\n");
#     $fh.close;
#     my $res = slurp $f;
#     is $res, "Hi\n", "printf() works with zero args";
#     unlink $f;
# }

say "# FUDGED!";
exit(1);

We can then test it:

$ raku S16-io/printf.rakudo
1..1
ok 1 - \# SKIP GH \#999999 not yet implemented
# FUDGED!

Success! Now we can commit the new test file, but NOT the generated fudge test file that will be generated automatically by the test harness during the regular testing on the servers. As described earlier, the new test file will have to be added to the spectest.data file via a PR.

Suggestions

Error Messages

In general, tests for the specific wording of error messages should go into the implementation's test suite and not become part of the specification.

Exception types

If the test expects a generic exception, generally you should use Exception and not X::Comp::AdHoc unless this is exactly what is expected. This is to handle a situation when a generic die is replaced with a typed exception to produce a more specific and manageable error. For example, say, we had:

if $bad-data {
    die "Bad data, expected better one"
}

and replace it with

if $bad-data {
    X::Data::Bad.new.throw
}

Then a test like:

throws-like { test-sub() }, X::Comp::AdHoc;

will start failing because X::Data::Bad is unlikely to inherit from X::Comp::AdHoc.