Something I've wanted for a while is a fake Gnus session that I can use for testing, since it's very hard to get Gnus up and running meaningfully without substantial customization. So I made the attached "gnus-mock.el" library. You start "emacs -Q", run `gnus-mock', and get a repeatable trashable Gnus session you can use for testing. What I did was put a basic Gnus installation under ./test/data/gnus/mock, and every time you start a mock session that installation gets copied to a temporary directory, and Gnus operates out of that directory for the duration of the session. You can abuse it however you like, and then when you quit it gets cleaned up. It has some hard-coded config (at present, just one nnmaildir server), and you have the option of laying your own config over that. It seems to work just fine. I can imagine all kinds of things we could do with this, but I wanted to float this here before I went any further, to get some feedback. Some things: 1. Ideally we'd have a bunch of messages in there, which can serve as sort of regression tests, and may also be useful for unit tests as well. Is there any concern about the size of data? My understanding is that this data will be discarded in an actual install, so maybe it doesn't matter so much? 2. I'm currently using `source-directory' to find the data dir. I guess, if we're expecting this only to be used for development in the source tree, then that's okay. 3. Locally, I wrote a python one-liner as a dummy `sendmail-program', that just returns a 0 exit code. A python script isn't really practical, and also I haven't done anything for the other mail sending protocols. What I'd really like is a little executable that accepts the message, and then sticks it in yet another directory within the temp installation. Then we can point `mail-sources' to that, and have a little boomerang where all sent messages come back to you. 4. It's not possible to pre-configure directory-based servers in `gnus-server-alist', as the directory paths need to be absolute, and at present they change every time `gnus-mock' is started. Not a tragedy, though. I've attached the gnus-mock code, and the dummy .gnus.el config file -- later, once there's some feedback on this, I can push a branch that contains the whole data dir. Hope this is welcome, Eric
gnus-mock.el
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.gnus.el
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