Shopify / Shopify/type_toolkit

Make `UnexpectedNilError` un-rescueable from tests

Open
#20 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Dominant language
Ruby
Stars
3
Forks
5
Avg merge
8d 23h
Merged PRs (30d)
8

Description

It currently inherits from Exception, so that a bare rescue => e doesn't unintentionally rescue it. We've already run into a real-world case where that proved useful, where a fork of the not_nil! implementation made it derive from StandardError, which indeed hid a test failure (only detected because we switched that copy of the code to use Type Toolkit).

To make it truly uncatchable, we can do something like throw Object.new. In a production app, this would crash your Rails app with UncaughtThrowError, so we'd have to limit it to tests. But we also don't want to crash minitest/RSpec, so we'd need to wrap the test runner in a catch call. We would need some kind of secret-ish tag to throw, that only the test runner can catch.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by locating UnexpectedNilError and the not_nil! implementation, then inspect how the project invokes minitest or RSpec. Determine how tests can prevent a bare rescue => e from hiding this error without crashing the test runner. Done means the error remains unrescueable by ordinary test code while minitest and RSpec continue to run.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
ruby
Domain
testing
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.