I Need To Write This Up To Understand It, or The Epic Battle between Wat and Derp!

I've signed up for Neil Bowers' Pull Request Challenge, as I've blogged about before.

This month, I'm working with System::Command. It's neat, a step up from system calls, and as I understand it, integral to handling Git programmically, within Git::Repository. If I wasn't elbow-deep, I might try to use it as part of my Net::Globus project.

But the challenge isn't to use a module, it's to commit changes to a project. I wrote book, and he suggested writing a test to catch a bug that shows up in Windows. There's lots of "what even?" that's been going along with this, the great majority has a lot to do with the difference between coding for your self and your lab and coding for a community. I mean, I really do not get what's going on here, and you know that old joke? "Doctor, it hurts when I do this!" "Don't do that, then!" I keep thinking "If this is breaking your code, do something else!"

But, that sort of thinking doesn't get your code merged. So, I'm proceeding, my mind becoming the ring for an epic cage match between Wat and Derp.

One of the points of Derp (thanks #win32 on irc.perl.org) is that warnings are not exceptions. Since the error as given has a distressingly consistent ability to lock up Powershell session, I hadn't thought of that. It's lead me to think about cutting back to the least amount of code you can include to get a behavior you want to test for. In this case, it isn't just giving the wrong result, it's kicking up a lot of errors. Or, rather, warnings.

Among the questions on the $64,000 Pyramid are:

• "Why does Git Bash shell show the IPC::Run::Win32Pump errors, after the next prompt shows up, while Powershell doesn't?" 
• "Is that significant?"
• "What, then, is killing the great Powershells of my laptop?"
• "How do you trap that?" 
• "Isn't that more a test issue or a program issue?"
• "How, then, do you turn this mess into a meaningful test?"

That last one is what I'll be sleeping on tonight. On the one hand, turn this into a .t file and any warning, any at all, would be enough to trigger the test, as it's demonstrated that no errors occur in Linux. On the other, a test that says "Yeah, this kicks up errors" seems less-than-helpful, so specifying the GEN7 and GEN11 seems like the kind of thing that could break on another system.

I suppose I could write both a general and specific error.

Any comments, either supportive ("Yeah, that's exactly the kind of test you need!"), inquisitive ("Can I use BEGIN blocks in my other work?") or dismissive ("_That_ is a stupid way to test this out!") will be read and learned from. 

Meanwhile, I wrote this after my bedtime, so good night.