[Seaside-dev] experience porting Grease-Tests to GNU Smalltalk

[Paolo Bonzini]

Hi all, Nicolas Petton and I finally got to porting Grease to gst and 
here are our impressions based on the failures we couldn't fix:

1) GRUtf8CodecTest>>#testCodecUtf8ShortestForm does not allow raising an 
exception.  What is the SUnit idiom for "raise an error or fail the 
assertion"?  Does this work:

    self should: [self deny: (codec decode: abc) = 'ABC']
         raise: Error

?

2) GRStringTest>>#testCapitalizeUmlauts fails.  GNU Smalltalk 
intentionally does not do a half-hearted implementation of non-ASCII 
#asLowercase/#asUppercase.  One day it will be fully Unicode compliant, 
but for now it's just A-Z and a-z (7-bit ASCII).  Do we need this test? 
  I can XFAIL it of course, but I wonder what is really using 
#capitalized with umlauts.  All uses I can find in Seaside run it on a 
selector.

3) GRCodecTest>>#testCodecLatin1Binary and 
GRUtf8CodecTest>>#testCodecUtf8Binary assume presence of a #binary 
method that apparently allows using ByteArrays instead of Strings. 
Again, is this method needed?  What is the spec, or can we remove the 
tests altogether?

4) Codec tests are a bit broken, in that they assume ISO-8859-1 is 
special in some way that I cannot really understand (and more so after 
the brief discussion of a few days ago).  In general, the tests must not 
assume that the literal 'Übèrstrîñgé' is expressed as ISO-8859-1,   as 
long as it is equal (#=) to whatever #decode: answers.  For example, gst 
literals use whatever is in the LC_ALL or LANG environment variables; 
typically UTF-8.  I'll test the changes I have here with Pharo and post 
a changeset on the bug tracker in a day or two.  In the meanwhile we can 
discuss items 1-3.

Thanks,

Paolo