BYO - Protocols for Test Discovery, Shell Completion

BYO is a simple mechanism to turn CLI processes into "servers" which respond to requests encoded in environment variables.

Points of reference:

(About the name: It originally stood for Bash YSH OSH. But "bring your own" is a good acronym!)

Table of Contents
The General Idea
Protocol
Detecting BYO Servers
Testing - discover and run
Shell completion - use these primitives
Client Tool
Appendix: Future Work
Other Applications
Coprocesses

The General Idea

Executables should respond to the BYO_COMMAND environment variable:

BYO_COMMAND=foo

And BYO_ARG=bar varies based on the command.

A library that implements this is:

source $LIB_OSH/byo-server.sh

But it's designed to be implemented in Python, C++, etc.

A client is:

test/byo-client.sh detect myscript.sh

Protocol

Detecting BYO Servers

Here's how you detect if an executable supports BYO:

$ BYO_COMMAND=detect ./any-executable </dev/null
list-tests
run-tests

# must exit with code 66, which is ASCII 'B'

Testing - discover and run

List tests first:

BYO_COMMAND=list-tests   

Then run them one at a time:

BYO_COMMAND=run-test
BYO_ARG=foo

Shell completion - use these primitives

TODO:

BYO_COMMAND=list-tasks  # related to task-five
BYO_COMMAND=list-flags  # only some binaries have flags

Client Tool

The tool should work like this:

$ byo detect myscript.sh
$ byo test myscript.sh

(Right now it's test/byo-client.sh)

Appendix: Future Work

Other Applications

Runtime:

Points of reference:

Coprocesses

Instead of a fresh process env variables, we might want to detect coprocesses.

Generated on Wed, 24 Jul 2024 05:15:48 +0000