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acme (189)

acme
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http://www.astray.com/

Leon Brocard (aka acme) is an orange-loving Perl eurohacker with many varied contributions to the Perl community, including the GraphViz module on the CPAN. YAPC::Europe was all his fault. He is still looking for a Perl Monger group he can start which begins with the letter 'D'.

Journal of acme (189)

Wednesday April 13, 2005

01:33 PM

Broth-filled dimsum. Also, Test::Expect!

[ #24168 ]

So clkao was getting bored with the version numbered-titled journal posts. Thus I now have codenames: Devel::ebug 0.38's codename was "Broth-filled dimsum", which might I add are quite tasty. It was a bit of a quiet release, a bit post-conference, pre-getting-back-into-the-swing-of-London. CHANGES :

- optimisation: only scan for plugins on start of backend - be sure to use strict and warnings in the plugins - in ebug and ebug_http, allow examining a variable using YAML

At the moment I'm busy adding more prerequisites (packagers will love me), but I'd like to show off one little module that came out of ebug: Test::Expect, which allows automated driving and testing of terminal-based programs (a la Expect program).

The reason I needed it was that I have a shell-like program, ebug, which I needed to test. I want to put commands in, check what output I get. There wasn't a test module which did exactly this, so I took Expect::Simple and wrapped it, adding a dead simple testing API. Once you've set it up, all you need to do is call expect with your input and expected output. For example, check out ebug.t test. Test your shell-like programs! Enjoy the goodness!

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