ocaml / ocaml/dune

Specify a specific shell to execute cram test commands

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#7,829 5 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

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cram
Dominant language
OCaml
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Description

Desired Behavior

Cram tests (and (system ...) commands) run in the default system shell. It would be useful to be able to specify a specific shell to use instead.

My specific use case is that I want to guarantee portability while writing tests, but I don't want to assume compatibility with my system shell (on MacOS, usually). Being able to automatically use a shell like dash would be an easy way to catch non-portable commands.

Example

I think it would make sense to expose this option as an environment variable or a CLI flag, since the configuration is local and I probably don't want to commit it in a dune file.

 DUNE_SHELL=/usr/local/bin/dash dune runtest

or

dune runtest --shell=/usr/local/bin/dash

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

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 tracing how Dune runs cram tests and (system ...) commands during dune runtest, including where the default system shell is selected. Compare the proposed environment-variable and CLI-flag approaches. Done means users can select a shell such as dash and both command types execute through it consistently.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
ocaml, shell
Domain
build-system, cli, testing
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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