[Monotone-devel] Re: Question for Tim - testsuite.lua giant list

[Graydon Hoare]

Zack Weinberg wrote:
> Is the giant list of test cases in testsuite.lua there because there's
> no readdir() equivalent in Lua's standard library, or is there some
> better reason?

I think there are 2 reasons:

  1. It was like that in autotest, which was M4-ish, and Timothy
     was doing a verbatim translation (great work, btw!)

  2. Explicit lists aren't always a bad thing. Our makefile uses
     them too. You trade one bug (executing something you didn't
     intend) for another (failure to execute something you
     expected but forgot to list).

I personally prefer big lists, but I won't argue the point strenuously.

> If it's the former, does anyone object to my snarfing Steve Kemp's
> lua-fs extension[1] into our local copy of the interpreter, and using
> that to get rid of the giant list?  

We should have enough machinery to code this internally using our 
file_io.hh interfaces. But it seems harmlelss enough to add either way.

(later on you assert that we already permit "os.execute() ==
 os.system()". There's an important difference: one is easier to
 slip an arbitrary shell string into via improper escaping.)

-graydon