The refactoring of the LCFG client has been continuing at good pace. I have now managed to move all the subroutines from the rdxprof script into the LCFG::Client module. This means that it is now possible to add unit tests for the functionality in these subs and I spent a bit of time yesterday adding the first simple tests. There are a lot more to go but it’s a good start. Adding the tests really helped me load more of the code into my brain so there are more benefits than just having testable code.
The big job for yesterday was really improving the sanity of the global variables. Some of the module code relied on the fact that it was being called from rdxprof to be able to access global variables declared in that script. Thus those modules wouldn’t work properly when loaded individually. In one case (the $root variable) it was declared as a global in two places and used as a local variable in many subroutines when passed in as an argument, that’s just a recipe for utter confusion. I’ve now removed one global but there is clearly a need to improve the situation further.
I also moved all the uses of values which are hardwired at build-time using cpp-style macros (e.g. @FOO@) into readonly variable declarations at the top of the modules. This makes it much more obvious which hardwired strings are required by each module. This is a first step towards replacing this approach with a configuration module (e.g. LCFG::Client::Config) which is how we handled the situation for the LCFG server.
Posted by squinney