[rspec-devel] Spec::Story::Runner.run_options

[Matt Patterson]

Hey there,

I've been playing with doing clever(ish) reporting things by hooking  
custom formatters in which do stuff (in my case, generating rspec  
output linked to Scrum project management artefacts like Sprint and  
Product Backlogs).

I'm looking at doing the same with Story Runner stories, but I was  
having real problems getting even the standard HTML story formatter  
to work.

It turned out that this was because the spec/rails/story_adapter code  
requires, and triggers, rspec_options (through the RailsExampleGroup  
subclassing of Test::Unit::TestCase, which gets extended elsewhere).  
rspec_options consumes and clears ARGV, so by the time poor old  
run_options gets a look in, there's no ARGV left, so a default  
Spec::Runner::Options ends up being created.

This is a problem for a couple of reasons. One, it's serious voodoo -  
it's the requiring, not explicit code running, that screws this up,  
and secondly, it only happens (AFAICT) when you require the Rails  
story adapter - vanilla non-rails Stories are fine (like, for  
instance, Story Runner's own specs...).

I'm looking at ways to fix this, because it's clearly a problem. My  
first thought was that run_options was a bit non-DRY, because it's  
doing the same thing as rspec_options does. I decided to just use  
rspec_options in its place. In practice this works fine and clears up  
the problem (because the voodoo works for you). However, this makes  
it almost impossible to test - I got a cascading failure, with stuff  
breaking throughout the Story Runner specs.

The way that kicking off option parsing, and making its results  
accessible, works is making me really nervous. Particularly, it feels  
like it shouldn't be this hard to test and work with.

I don't know what other peoples thoughts are, but I'm seriously  
thinking about trying to come up with an alternate way. Would people  
be interested?

Matt

-- 
   Matt Patterson | Design & Code
   <matt at reprocessed org> | http://www.reprocessed.org/