Posted by rue, Fri May 04 00:21:00 UTC 2007

Hi!

After a hiatus due to an ill-advised COBOL->Java conversion project at work, I may again have enough time to post these semi-regularly. My apologies. I will start off easy with two topics and then try to work in some older news along with a hopefully-steady stream of, er, new news.

I think this forum might actually be easier for me to work with so I will try it out for a bit. Perhaps brixen could set up a nice subforum just for the Newsletter for ease of navigation and RSS’ing.

• Locality of testing platforms

  Evan put some collected money to good use and got an Intel Mac Mini. Currently he has managed to cram Solaris and FreeBSD on there as well so potential platform-specific problems and tweaks should be easier to do. He also said that if we ever get an UltraSparc machine, I get to house it :D

• Speccing

  We (and by we I mean brixen) finally got fed up trying to get RSpec to run natively on Rubinius and the host/target workaround so he wrote a quick little replacement residing at spec/mini_rspec.rb.

  I contributed a few small improvements and a stupid bash kludge to run the specs so now

  bin/specrunner 

  will allow you to run new-style specs with relative ease.

  New-style? Well, with the change we can finally get rid of the example do … end syntax for the specs. This means that all current specs have to be restructured to the normal spec-style. I am currently working down spec/core (Enumerable now) and brixen is “cherry-picking” files to convert whatever that means. Any help there is appreciated.

  Next step, once all of the specs are converted, is to start running them at least semi-regularly. Watching thousands of specs go by is probably not the easiest way to figure out whether your change is working as intended so the Rakefile has two new tasks, spec:diff:run and spec:diff:save. The first one grabs a previous capture of a full spec run from spec/diffs/base.txt and runs a diff -u against a current spec run. This should make it easier to see what has changed and whether you might have broken something else. The latter task just saves a new base run.

Until later! Watch this space.

Filed Under: rubinius | Tags: irc newsletter rubinius