Re: New to go packaging. Need help with a test that has hard coded date value...

[Daniel Swarbrick <dswarbrick@debian.org>]

Hi Scarlett,

Welcome to the team!

On 20.02.23 11:16, Scarlett Moore wrote:
> func TestTitleHeading(t *testing.T) {
>     doc := NewDocument()
>     doc.Heading(1, "Title", "A short description", time.Now())
>
>     if doc.String() != `.TH TITLE 1 "2022-01-11" "Title" "A short 
> description"` {
>         t.Error("Expected title heading, got:", doc.String())
>
> Obviously, the test fails as the date there is today. So patching the 
> test with todays date passes it, but this is a maintenance nightmare. 
> Is there a better way?
Since you are in control of the time.Time that is passed to 
doc.Heading(), I think the simplest approach would be to replace the 
time.Now() param with a static timestamp, e.g.:

doc.Heading(1, "Title", "A short description", time.Date(2022, 1, 11, 0, 
0, 0, 0, time.UTC))

It's curious that upstream (https://github.com/muesli/roff) would 
publish code containing such a test, as it would only have passed on 
that particular day. Or perhaps they run tests in a VM which has its 
clock set to that date prior to running the tests...? In any case, such 
a test would be worth forwarding upstream, since a vanilla checkout of 
that code is obviously never (again) going to pass tests successfully in 
its current state.

I have seen trickier cases where the time.Now() call is _inside_ the 
function being tested, which necessitates overriding the time.Now() 
function with a mock variant, designed to return a specific timestamp 
when called.

HTH.

Attachment: OpenPGP_signature
Description: OpenPGP digital signature