Trying out the rspec version 0.9 previewEdit

Created , updated

These are notes I made while trying out the rspec 0.9 beta 1 preview gem. I later updated to 0.9.2, skipping over 0.9.1: see "Upgrading to RSpec 0.9.2".

Steps

  • Pre-testing

I first double-checked that all specs were passing for Walrus. This is a good test because there are a lot of specifications, many of them containing numerous assertions:

# from the top level directory of the Walrus source tree
rake spec

Output:

Finished in 40.956492 seconds

299 specifications, 0 failures
  • Download and installation
# download
wget "http://rspec.rubyforge.org/rspec-0.9.0.gem"

# install
sudo gem install rspec-0.9.0.gem

# update fast doc index
fastri-server -b
  • Run specs again.
rake spec

A huge number of errors were raised because deprecated methods like should_raise are no longer present.

Finished in 11.389094 seconds

299 examples, 157 failures
rake aborted!
  • Run the translator *
spec_translator spec spec
  • Visually inspect the changes *

Using SVK:

svk st

Output:

M   spec/additions/module_spec.rb
M   spec/grammar/additions/regexp_spec.rb
M   spec/grammar/additions/string_spec.rb
M   spec/grammar/and_predicate_spec.rb
M   spec/grammar/continuation_wrapper_exception_spec.rb
M   spec/grammar/match_data_wrapper_spec.rb
M   spec/grammar/memoizing_cache_spec.rb
M   spec/grammar/node_spec.rb
M   spec/grammar/not_predicate_spec.rb
M   spec/grammar/parser_state_spec.rb
M   spec/grammar/parslet_choice_spec.rb
M   spec/grammar/parslet_combining_spec.rb
M   spec/grammar/parslet_merge_spec.rb
M   spec/grammar/parslet_omission_spec.rb
M   spec/grammar/parslet_repetition_spec.rb
M   spec/grammar/parslet_sequence_spec.rb
M   spec/grammar/parslet_spec.rb
M   spec/grammar/predicate_spec.rb
M   spec/grammar/proc_parslet_spec.rb
M   spec/grammar/regexp_parslet_spec.rb
M   spec/grammar/string_enumerator_spec.rb
M   spec/grammar/string_parslet_spec.rb
M   spec/grammar/symbol_parslet_spec.rb
M   spec/grammar_spec.rb
M   spec/parser_spec.rb

I tried rerunning the specs but this time the failure was instantaneous due to syntax errors introduced by the translator. These were fairly easy to fix: I checked out a clean copy of the source code and used opendiff to compare the old and new codebases, manually fixing the problems and using BBEdit to semi-automate some of the more numerous, repetitive changes using a multi-file regular-expression-based find and replace.

See this message posted to the rspec-users mailing list for more details.

Now the specs were running again but I still had to eliminate some "warning: parenthesize argument(s) for future version" warnings produced because of lack of parentheses around some method parameters.

wget http://rspec.rubyforge.org/RSpec-0.9.0.tmbundle.tgz
tar xzvf RSpec-0.9.0.tmbundle.tgz
rm -rf "/Users/wincent/Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles/RSpec.tmbundle"
mv RSpec.tmbundle /Users/wincent/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles/

The bundle is really fantastic. It provides lots of shortcuts for writing specs which I confess I don’t really use much; the outstanding feature is the ability to run specs from within TextMate: hit Command-R and you can either run the current file as a Ruby file, run the focussed specification only (where the text insertion cursor is), run all specifications, or run the specs in the selected files/directories.

See also