Make Ruby Tests Greener

The Ruby Greener Test Challenge is here. It is attempt to make Ruby on Windows better and more stable and direct goal of this challenge is to fix all tests and to reach 0F0E (0 failures, 0 errors) state. If you are Ruby developer on Windows you should consider taking a role in the challenge.

If you decide to try to fix some failing tests or existing errors it is easy to set up complete environment with the help of Ruby Challenge Pack. I will not write about details here since you have all you need in the initial challenge post given in the link on top of the article. Instead I will give you few suggestions about participating in the challenge.

You should be aware of three things when you run tests:

1. Set up console code page to 1252 or 65001. Some tests may fail due to the console code page, so before running tests you should execute chcp 1252 or chcp 65001.
2. Option -j2 may lead to errors. In case you want to run tests faster you can use `make test-al TESTS=“-qv -j2”` but be aware that this can also lead to fals failures or errors.
3. Anti-virus software. If you see Errno::EACCES: Permission denied error in test, most likely the cause is anti-virus which locked the file during tests.

With these things on your mind you can proceed to fixing. Here is simple workflow you can use. The very first thing you should do is to clone Ruby source from GitHub:

git clone git://github.com/ruby/ruby.git

After deciding what you want to fix you should make new local branch in which you work:

git checkout -b fix-win32ole-fso-encoding-misuse

After you find a source of failures or errors you will make fixes and commit changes to your local branch. I would suggest making small commits. If commits contain too many changes, patches are harder to apply and are more likely to cause conflicts. Finally after finishing all fixes you just have to make a patch (es).

git checkout -b fix-win32ole-fso-encoding-misuse

Adjust last number in above command to the number of commits you made on your local branch. This will create one or more patch files (one file per commit). In the case of already submitted fix single file was created: 0001-FileSystemObject-does-not-support-UTF-8.patch. At the end open a ticket, write small description, attach your patch file(s) and assign ticket to Luis Lavena.