Automated unit tests?

[anko]

Now that we've got all sorts of pull requests going on, it might be good to at least think about unit-testing. We've had regressions and they're always hard to catch manually, but could have been prevented with automated tests that check for known past issues and correctness.

I don't know exactly how the tests would look, but @livibetter's manual test of piping generated sound into cava's inputs (#15) might make a good starting point.

In its present state, cava is tough to write tests for, as everything is in a single file that does many things. Separating the model ("how high should bars be") from its presentation ("how do we print this") would be a good first step.

Further thoughts, ideas?

[karlstav]

I don't really have an idea of how this whold be organized either. But it sounds like a good idea.

Creating a seperate function for drawing (printing) has been my plan since the beginning, but haven't gotten around to it.

[hashhar]

I am willing to work on this. I was writing a PR for #91 (see #115) and saw a lot of ways to modularize it.

Currently a lot of the things are repeated in multiple places which makes the code fragile. If you forget to change something in all of the places, it becomes a mess.
Also the idea of @karlstav to have separate output modules for different types of output is a good one.

I think we should have a mental model of how we want to organise this before going ahead and doing changes.

[karlstav]

@hashhar great to see that you are taking an interest in this! The code is still a mess (and has gotten messier lately).

BTW don't we already have have separate output modules for different types of output? Maybe my definition of "module" is off..?

[hashhar]

@karlstav No, I was saying that the recent changes you made to separate the output modules was a good step. We want more of that. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

[karlstav]

ahh yes. Agreed, a lot of other things should be separated out, like the config reading and validating,

[karlstav]

as discussed in pr168, the proof of the need of these tests proved itself immediately.

@vinodadhikary can you give me some pointers on where to begin with these tests. I really don't have a clue where to begin.

[vinodadhikary]

@karlstav, sincere apologies for delayed reply. I have forked your code and am currently trying to understand it. I will try to put together something around testing over the weekend that we can refer to in the future.