assert.Fail signature

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
45/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
go
Domain
testing

Research direction

Start in assert/assertions.go at the linked assert.Fail implementation and compare it with the two invocation forms shown in the issue. Check how the signature is used elsewhere and define the expected behavior for a call containing only the formatted message arguments; done means that usage no longer panics and existing behavior remains covered.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

I don't get why the signature of assert.Fail requires a mandatory string, and I think it's misleading.

I had a panic because of that, I used the method like that :

assert := assert.New(t)
assert.Fail("stuff should be %d", 42) // PANICS

The panic occurs because 42 is type asserted to string (see https://github.com/stretchr/testify/blob/master/assert/assertions.go#L178)

So currently the correct way to use this method is :

assert.Fail("failed", "stuff should be %d", 42)

But I don't see the benefit of such signature, I think the method shouldn't have a failureMessage argument, only msgAndArgs.

WDYT?

Dominant language
Go
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