Re: monodevelope

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

Hi Max,

On Tue, 2006-10-24 at 15:38 +0200, Max wrote:
> After finishing my SoC and relaxing a little bit afterwards i have been
> back hacking on beagle for the last two weeks. I was curious about how
> to use NUnit tests and monodevelop. 

Early this week was the Mono Summit, and late last week a lot of the
Novell Mono hackers were in the office so I had the opportunity to talk
and work with a lot of them.

I tried using MonoDevelop for a couple of weeks earlier this month and
while it's a great editor on its own, it's not particularly flexible in
how you set up your projects.  I know I've spent a distressingly large
amount of my life getting our automake setup to work with building both
C and C#, lots of conditional components, and correct dependencies so
that make -j works.  MD does not (yet) offer this flexibility in its
automake export, nor does it offer integration in building with existing
automake setups.

Anyway, Larry (F-Spot), Aaron (Banshee), and I talked with the main
MonoDevelop hacker at the summit and let him know how important these
are to us.  I'd like to get the benefits of autocomplete, etc., but MD
needs to work with our existing setup.

That said, for all my future projects I am definitely going to use MD
from the start. :)

As for NUnit, it's probably worth investigating.  There is a large
amount of code that can be tested with unit tests, but in my mind the
much harder part of testing software is how all the components fit
together.  That's why we have Bludgeon for stress testing the daemon,
and a set of test scripts in the beagle-test module in Novell forge to
test a large body of documents.  (Sadly it is missing a lot of
problematic documents because they contain proprietary information.)

One thing that I find very interesting is that Aaron showed at the
Summit that he had embedded a Boo shell into Banshee.  This allows him
to not only write plugins in Boo, but also gives him an interactive
console from which he can run tests.  Doing something like this in
Beagle would give us something close to an interactive debugger from
which we can run tests on live data.  I'd like to play around with that.

Joe