Handling broken `ns` forms

[marick]

One thing you can ask Midje to do from the repl is to load all of the test files. It uses bultitude (either namespaces-in-dir or namespaces-on-classpath) to find files that load. A problem is that new test files can contain errors in the ns statement (especially when they're created by copy-paste-and-edit). Because bultitude silently throws those files away, Midje doesn't load them, so the non-eagle-eyed user can be fooled into thinking all the tests passed, rather than that none of them were run.

(That non-eagle-eyed user would be me: marick/Midje#166 )

I wonder if it would be useful for read-ns-form to allow the reader's complaint here:
https://github.com/Raynes/bultitude/blob/master/src/bultitude/core.clj#L27
https://github.com/Raynes/bultitude/blob/master/src/bultitude/core.clj#L30
... to make it to standard out, standard error, or some state variable that could be queried by client code that cared.

(Probably best would be a second return value done the way Common Lisp does it. But we don't have that upgrade path.)

If one of these seems a reasonable thing, I'll make a pull request.

[Raynes]

Definitely no state.

I suppose it would be reasonable to add an option to print the exceptions to standard error, but it would be better if we could return a vector of [nses errors] or something. The upgrade path isn't a problem, because that's what major version bumps are for, and it could just be an option that makes this happen if it seems like a big deal.

Thoughts?

[marick]

After I posted, I thought an N-argument function might be best

(namespaces-in-dir <dir>) => same result as now
(namespaces-in-dir <dir> :error-log) => [same-result-as-now map-from-namespaces-to-error-info

That is backward-compatible.

It's also similar to Common Lisp multi-value results, so it has pedigree.

[Raynes]

Exactly what I was thinking. I'll accept a pull request adding this!

[marick]

I've been hacking around on this. The core function produces output like this (some keys omitted):

({:file #<File ./project.clj>,
  :status :no-attempt-at-namespace
  :source :standalone
 {:file #<File ./src/bultitude/core.clj>,
  :status :contains-namespace,
  :namespace-symbol bultitude.core
  :source :standalone}
 {:file #<File ./test/bultitude/invalid.clj>,
  :status :invalid-clojure-file
  :source :standalone})

From this, namespaces-in-dir and namespaces-on-classpath (and namespaces-in-jar) are simple matters of filtering and mapping. (Jar files are handled by a lot of the same code, but the :source is :jar-file.)

Does this seem reasonable?

I'll probably put this into a pre-release of Midje before submitting a pull request. A little bashing by Midje-using projects would make me more confident in the changes I've made.

[marick]

Any interest in my converting the tests into Midje? I've been adding tests, and using test-unit is seriously cramping my development style.

[Raynes]

No thanks, I'd rather stick to clojure.test.

The other stuff looks good.