Subject: Re: [PATCH v6] gitweb: add test suite with Test::WWW::Mechanize::CGI

From: Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 11:23:41 +0200

On Tue, 24 Jun 2008, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> About the Test::WWW::Mechanize::CGI thing, how widely available is it?
> I do not think it is packaged for Debian nor Ubuntu, for example.

Not very widely; practically you have to install it from CPAN.  
Test::WWW::Mechanize::CGI is at v0.1, WWW::Mechanize::CGI is at v0.3.

But if Test::WWW::Mechanize::CGI is not installed, test would be not 
run.  If you are gitweb developer, then installing locally in $HOME 
from CPAN is I guess viable option; if you are not gitweb developer, we 
still have t/t9500-gitweb-standalone-no-errors.sh

The whole point of using those packages was that it makes it _easy_
to write those tests.  This consist of two parts: 

1). running gitweb as if it was CGI application, which otherwise would 
either require deep knowledge of how CGI application is invoked (what 
it is in WWW::Mechanize::CGI and required dependence 
HTTP::Request::AsCGI which I think does all the work) or working
web server, done a la "git instaweb",

2.) accessing and testing gitweb output (what Test::WWW::Mechanize,
WWW::Mechanize does; we could do the same with LWP* modules from 
libwww-perl / perl-libwww-perl package and Test::More from Perl, but
it would be repeating Test::WWW::Mechanize work).
-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland