The GSoC projects were announced on May 1st, and I was fortunate enough to be selected for the project ‘Move existing tests to a unit testing framework’. My proposal can be read here. All in all, I am really excited to be contributing to Git under the mentorship of Christian Couder from GitLab and Kaartic Sivaraam.
I plan to post about my progress every alternate mondays. The post feed can be found here. My Git fork, where I’ll primarily be pushing before sending to the mailing list, can be found here.
A Synopsis about the project
Git has traditionally used helper binaries which import the library to test a certain functionality and these binaries take arguments/options for a desired output. These binaries are used by the shell scripts to test their output against the expected output.
However, due to many reasons outlined in my proposal, this setup of testing through shell scripts may not be ideal. Therefore, a new TAP ( Test Anything Protocol, which allows individual tests/TAP producers to communicate test results to the testing harness in a language-agnostic way) implementation of a unit testing framework was merged into Git late last year, which allows us to write unit tests solely in C. And this project involves converting some of the existing unit tests (shell script based ones) to C using the new framework. However, some these t/helper binaries are also used as utility tools for setup purposes elsewhere in the testing suite, therefore these types of binaries would be low on the priority list of possible migrations to the new unit testing framework.
What’s next?
The official coding period for GSoC begins on 27th May. Until then I will be looking at the existing legacy unit tests, and deciding with mentors on which unit tests are worth converting to the new framework.
This project was also taken up by the recent Outreachy intern Achu Luma, but some of her patches seem to have dropped to the void. I’ll also be looking at how to get them merged during this phase of community bonding.
Ciao!