Make IRC mockable.

[emberian]

Mostly the addition of IRC#emit, as well as something for things like IRC#privmsg et al to log somewhere. I've forked and will work on this. Feedback? Advice?

[gf3]

Good call! I actually have some mock stuff under /spec in the feature/twopointoh branch. IRC#emit is a neat idea, if you're using the 2.0.0-beta or feature/twopointoh branch you can hack it with instance._internals.emitter.emit("dix").

[emberian]

MockInternals looks like it should be ready for drop-in replacement of instance._internals, anything unfinished? I think I have a fairly good idea of the changes I want to make.

If you were writing tests for a bot or a client, what would you want? At first I thought something like IRC#emit would be a good idea but I just realized that then I'd probably be giving it an object like I'd be given in the event listener, but that's not a good source of data because that might change or be something I don't expect. I could give it raw IRC lines and have it parse it and such, but that's not really good because it's a pain in the ass to write. So what I'm thinking I'll end up writing is a convenience library for building IRC protocol strings. But pretty much every method of IRC is already doing that for its own thing, so my thought is to hotswap instance._internals.socket with a simple object that I can pull the string from afterwards, replace the socket object, and then send that string back through with instance._internals.socket.emit(that_string).

Thoughts?

[gf3]

I honestly think the simplest solution is using actual, raw IRC messages. Less room for error. Also allows you to copy paste failing IRC messages and use them in tests.

[emberian]

On that note, I've been thinking that something like expect(1) would be good. You'd have something like this:

expect NICK foobar
expect USER js-irc 0 * :Javascript Bot
send "intro_and_motd.irc"

# This is a comment. Up there is how you'd include a file, it's just a bunch of raw irc lines
# Comments are lines that start with # and nothing else. Different syntax?
expect JOIN #test
send "join_channel.irc"
send :tester!tester@example.com PRIVMSG #test :foobar: ping
expect PRIVMSG #test :tester: pong

# Maybe some programmatic tests?
function (prev) { 
    return (prev.params[1] == 'foobar: ping')
}

Or something along those lines. Would be fairly simple to write, basically just a script that the bot should be following. For the programmatic tests, the argument passed would be like the objects event handlers get in IRC#on. A simple parser could just look for 'function', then count curly braces till the number of { is the number of }, and pass the body off to new Function. Expected to return true/false, or a string indicating what the error was.

Thoughts?

[gf3]

I think most of this we get for free from existing testing frameworks, albeit a tad more verbose. I'm not sure the benefits of using this system would outweigh the burden of maintaining it. Would be cool, perhaps, as a generalized network testing framework.

[emberian]

I'll sleep on it and write some tests with an existing framework (probably node-tap) and see if it'd be worth my time. Do you know of anything using irc-js that has tests?

[gf3]

Nothing other than IRC-js itself.