Start/2005-03-03/1

More on Darcs, LectroTest

Darcs. In Source code management with Darcs: a first look, I wrote about my initial, positive experiences with the Darcs source-code management system. If you are interested in another perspective, Dave Roberts has written about Darcs in Darcs and Arch revisited. The short version is that he likes Darcs.

LectroTest. A couple of things. First, I am writing an article on LectroTest for Perl.com. Right now, I am carefully selecting examples and planning the article around them. Good examples make for good writing. Once I have settled on my examples, I will draft an outline and send it to O’Reilly for approval. Then, the prep work having been done, I'll write the article, which should be the easy part.

To find good examples, I have been testing modules from CPAN and the Perl Core with LectroTest. I hope to show how easy it is to use specification-based testing to (1) test real-world software and (2) find problems that otherwise would have gone overlooked, even in much-used and already trusted software. So far, I have found a few run-of-the-mill bugs, but I want to see if I can find anything really juicy. As always, the limiting factor is my free time.

Second, I released version 0.3200 of LectroTest last night. This version adds a minor new feature, the ability to attach notes and value dumps to trials. In the event a trial fails during a property check, its notes will be emitted as part of the failure output (along with the counterexample). These notes can be used like an airplane's flight recorder to capture interior data points in order to make after-failure debugging easier.