Re: ert.el --- Emacs Lisp Regression Testing

[Phil Hagelberg <phil@evri.com>]

Christian Ohler <ohler+emacs@fastmail.net> writes:

> I'm a big fan of automated testing/unit testing.  However, it seems
> that there is no widely-used testing framework for Emacs Lisp yet.
> I've tried various packages (regress.el, elunit.el, elk-test.el,
> XEmacs' test-harness.el, the code in slime.el, and cc-mode's tests),
> but they're all either too simplistic, very specialized, or not very
> Lispy.

Your code looks very interesting. 

I'm the author of elunit. I'm obviously very interested in unit testing
in Emacs Lisp (preferably test-driven development, but any tests are
good.) elunit has mostly been driven by my own needs, so it's no
surprise that it doesn't seem like a great fit for everyone, but I would
love to see unit testing get more traction in the Emacs community,
whether it's through elunit or ERT.

ERT looks several orders of magnitude more complicated than elunit, but
obviously it has a lot more functionality. I'm not so attached to elunit
that I think it's the only way to go. I'd love to play around with this
and see how it works. Perhaps we can merge our efforts.

Richard's idea of using a sub-emacs for testing sounds pretty promising
as well. I've beaten my head against the problem of testing with a fresh
instance, and it's always been rather awkward. Running it in a term
could make it easier to automate.

Phil
http://technomancy.us