Hi,
Is it realistic and desirable to tweak RSpec so that the
MockExpectationError for a stubbed message works as specified in the
attached spec patch?
In short, we wasted some time today on a wild goose chase because a
failing expectation error was saying “unexpected arguments, expected:
(#<Foo …>, #<Bar …>), got: ([#<Foo …>, #<Bar …>])” which made it
look like we were accidentally building an array around our arguments
somewhere in our implementation. Ultimately it turned out that it was a
genuine problem with equality between the Foo instances but we were
distracted by the array notation for the actual arguments.
Having looked at the RSpec specs I now see that this is intended
behaviour because the error is reporting an array of argument arrays,
one for each unexpected message. This is understandable but, I think,
unnecessarily misleading; it would be much nicer if the most common case
(only one unexpected message) looked like “got: (#<Foo …>, #<Bar
…>)” and we found another syntax for showing multiple calls. In the
spec patch I’ve suggested “got: (#<Foo …>, #<Bar …>), (#<Baz …>,
#<Qux …>)” because that shows multiple messages while avoiding any
confusion about whether actual arrays were involved.
I realise this would involve some changes to the plumbing around
ErrorGenerator so that the semantics of
#raise_unexpected_message_args_error become “here is a (usually
single-element) array of argument arrays” rather than the current hack
of “here is an argument array (except occasionally it won’t quite be,
but always display it as though it is)”.
I’m happy to investigate, but before I do, does my suggestion meet with
general approval?
Cheers,
-Tom