On Dec 13, 2008, at 10:17 , Joshua Ballanco wrote:

> Quick question from the unwashed masses: I admit I have not been  
> following along closely, but is there a reason that 'testrb'  
> wouldn't be moved from test/unit to minitest/unit?

um. this got kinda big. sorry.

1) a small (semantic) correction: nothing was moved from test/unit to  
minitest as minitest was implemented from scratch.

2) I implemented only what I found to be the essence of test/unit and  
really that was the testcase public api and a very simple runner. I  
went with subclassing as the only testcase discovery mechanism because  
that works better for junit and rubinius (because  
ObjectSpace.each_object is a PITA).

3) I didn't see any point in testrb. Indeed I forgot about it until  
reminded. I've never once used testrb in my normal process nor has  
anyone I've ever paired with. (Well, to be honest, I tried a couple  
times back in the day, didn't get it to work for me, and ignored it  
from then on). I've pretty much always run my tests via autotest,  
rake, or just straight up (usually in that priority order).

4) Tests are just ruby. They should run the same way that anything  
else you write in ruby runs: with the ruby interpreter. I really  
dislike systems like rspec and mspec that require a runner script to  
work. They're harder to use, hook, debug and generally have way more  
"stuff" than I ever want to deal with.

In short: "Do the simplest thing that could possibly work" should  
apply to more than just the code.