At the beginning of February, Engine Yard announced a very interesting project called Gem Testers.
Gem Testers was built to make it easier for gem developers to write gems that run everywhere. This is split into two pieces:
- rubygems-test is a Rubygems plugin which automatically runs the test suite of a specified gem on install.
- Gem-testers.org is a central repository for test data. Test results are organized primarily by Ruby version and operating system.
I believe this is a wonderful project and it can have a very good impact on the quality of the available Ruby gems.
Whois currently counts 211 RSpec examples and 1899 tests with 8674 assertions. This is a very huge test suite which is able to provide an immediate feedback on existing bugs.
The new Whois version now includes support for gem test. You can decide to run the tests automatically when installing the gem or run them later by executing
$ gem test whois
Read rubygems-test README for further information.
Unfortunately, this feature forced me to re-include all the test fixtures and files into the packaged .gem. It means the size of .gem file will be bigger than previous releases.