use Perl

• Who is the audience for TAP? (Score:1)

  by dagolden (6584) on 2008.04.18 7:53 (#62271) Journal

  For the most part, we aim to ensure that the casual user sees no difference. Got that? The casual user should see no difference!

  I'm a little confused here. Who is the target audience for TAP? And are you confusing that audience with the "casual user" that installs a module from CPAN and sees lots of junk scroll by on the terminal?

  The fact that CPAN module installation shows a lot of diagnostics to "casual" users is a historical accident and one that distribution packagers, whether PPM or .deb or .rpm already have addressed. (Leave aside for the moment whether or not that has other issues.)

  I've argued (casually) for a while that TAP should be out-of-band with the terminal screen. At most, some high level summary should make it to screen and the rest should get saved into a file somewhere for someone to pick through if they need. That person, almost by definition, is not a "casual" user.

  For namespace disambiguation, all I should need to know is what package produced the diagnostics. If test Test::Wibble uses "Time" to mean "start time" and Test::Wobble uses "Time" to mean duration, then I should be able to look that up in the documentation of each module. If one of them flouts a common convention, then by reviews and bug reports and jawboning, confusing test modules will get censured and used less.

  Even if someone manually sets diagnostics from the *.t file, I'll see a producer of "main" and know that I'll have to look at the source to see what they're doing.

  If you think the audience is automated tools downstream that need to know what "Time" means, then you'll need to define some standard diagnostics that people can use and have downstream tools only rely on those.

  -- dagolden

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  • Re: (Score:2)

    by Ovid (2709)

    use.perl seems buggy if I'm previewing several times. The reply below was for you.