Re: library dependencies and unit/integration testing

[Tom Tromey <tromey@redhat.com>]

>>>>> "Ted" == Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:

Ted> What capabilities does Emacs offer for tracking library dependencies
Ted> beyond 'require and `load-history'?  I think versions (as stated by the
Ted> Version header) are not tracked and that's a basic requirement.  Then,
Ted> how would a library state it depends on "foo v.1 or later and bar v.2
Ted> exactly"?

Emacs doesn't provide much.

package.el defines an extension to the header comments for tracking
dependencies.  It looks like (example from ruby-compilation):

;;; Package-Requires: ((ruby-mode "1.0") (inf-ruby "2.0"))

This just means that this package requires ruby-mode >= 1.0 and inf-ruby
>= 2.0.

I only allowed >= requires to keep package.el simple, and because I
don't think there is any real need for anything more complicated.

Ted> In order to ensure these dependencies are tracked correctly, is there a
Ted> *standard* way in Emacs to test if a library loads and runs some basic
Ted> unit and integration tests correctly?

No.

For package.el it would be a bad idea to load all packages.  This is
slow, and loading a package can have undesirable side effects.

Tom