Last night I finally resolved a problem with the Rakudo test harness. I am fairly new to the perl development model, so I spent the last week or so gaining an understanding. I still have a plenty to learn, but I eventually learned what I needed to do to (temporarily) get changes into the parrotcode.

There is a long post on the Rakudo blog about what’s currently happening in Rakudo. I figured I’d just briefly mention a little bit more detail a few things that I had to figure out manually.

The harness is located in t/harness. The test harness builds a list of files based on the t/spectest_regression.dat. From there, it will run the t/spec/fudge script to update the tests for the Rakudo implementation (noted by the ?rakudo lines). Only after this happens are the tests run.

I found that I was not running all of the tests and the fudge script was complaining by only throwing a help message. This was happening because I had some svn locks that needed to be cleaned up. I created a patch that threw a warning and skips the test. I submitted the patch through the slick perl RT system (this tracking system is pretty amazing, it converts mailing list reports to patches and bug reports) that resolves this problem.

Lets hope this will be the first of many patches. As of last night, there were over 2100 tests being passed. This is due to the diligent work of being placed in the spectest. From here, I will try to help Auzon mark each of the skipped tests and submit RT tickets accordingly.