For the longest time, I wasn’t able to run autotest on one of my projects. That was OK; I was intrigued by autotest, but had never really committed to it. The problem: whenever I would try to run autotest, I’d get the following error:
loading autotest/rails_rspec
Autotest style autotest/rails_rspec doesn't seem to exist. Aborting.
I’m running Shoulda, not RSpec, so I had no idea why this was happening. I tried installing (and uninstalling) RSpec in various configurations, to no avail. Nothing worked.
Then I started a new project. Autotest worked just fine on it. After a few days, I got used to autotest, and a few days later, I came to really like it. It helps me get into a TDD “flow” – all tests pass; write failing tests; write code; all tests pass.
So when I came back to my previous project where autotest didn’t work, I decided to dig deeper. Eventually I found a plugin that was causing the problem: acts-as-taggable-on. The plugin was written to allow autotesting, as explained in a blog post. Supposedly, this is supposed to be a different autotest instance from your app’s main instance, but it wasn’t working that way for me.
The fix? Delete lib/discover.rb from the acts-as-taggable-on plugin. That’s it – autotest works now.
In the end, I maybe could have solved the problem by getting RSpec configured properly, but just running the gem locally didn’t do the trick for me, and I don’t want to add any code to my app to support autotesting of a plugin that I never want to test.
So should plugins even ship with test code? Yes, they should. Not for normal use; I never run plugin tests, assuming instead that the plugin is tested by the author. But if an open source plugin ships without tests, it’s that much harder for other developers to fork/fix/improve the plugin. But really, that’s about the only reason for plugin/gem tests. And they should never touch application tests.
