Today, I embarked on revisiting some older projects of mine. Among the mix, there were things like OpenMaps, and a little physics engine. The biggest one though, was FsTag. A project I picked up and promptly abandoned when I felt it was done (being a way to pass time, after all).

So, I patched it up and am proud to say I changed absolutely nothing. Except, I wanted to write some unit tests for it. And guess what? There’s not a single test framework (that I could find) for command line tools. There’s bash-based ones, but I hate bash. Alas, I got to working on my own, ClUnit. It’s nothing too big, just a big wrapper over the command line. Which I’ll tell you, was more annoying than it was worth.

The initial idea was to have a persistent terminal as long as tests were running, or at least a persistent terminal per session. The developer was also allowed to make new sessions as well. This all locked me into a very ugly system, which had a 50/50 change to hang on any given command. Thus, I scrapped it all and went for the traditional “make a cmd process with /C arguments, and ReadToEnd().” Point is, it was very annoying, and I’ll have to come back to it eventually.

Otherwise, that’s all. I’ll be posting updates as I go along with this (as well as other projects). FsTag will also share the spotlight, alongside BakedEnv, and my operating system, and basically everything else. You get the point.