Blogging Ottinger (tim)

Free software is not entirely trouble free, especially on the cutting edge. Policies of freedom and practices of projects don’t always align in convenient ways, and sometimes you just have to wait a little while.

My task was to get basic mono C# with NUnit running on my Debian “sid” laptop. It doesn’t sound so hard. I figured I wanted to have NUnit running right away, since I didn’t want to even go exploring without having some kind of unit tests. I figured on using some Object Mentor design exercises as fodder.

I decided to start with monodevelop IDE. I wanted it to help me not do stupid things, if only by omitting options for doing stupid things. I agonize over that for a little while. Maybe it would be easier to work from the command line. It probably would be simpler, and I’d know more about the command options. I give in to my baser instincts and allow monodevelop to help me. I hope it won’t hurt me.

I started a project, and added “using NUnit;” to the sample startup code. If it compiled and still printed “hello world”, I’m be on my way. Of course, it did not. Hence the wisdom of taking baby steps. NUnit isn’t found. Reasonable. I didn’t add it to the project. Minor UI difficulties ensued. I couldn’t see the project tab because the doc tab was open. When I closed the doc, I could see more stuff. I don’t know if I missed a clue or what. Maybe it told me the project was behind the doc, in a separate tab or something. I don’t know now.

Okay, I edit “References” (I’ve read enough web pages to know that’s what libraries/assemblies need) and don’t see NUnit. Thats odd.

[0]tottinge@inigo:~$ locate dll | grep -i unit
[1]tottinge@inigo:~$ locate nunit
/usr/lib/monodoc/sources/nunit-docs.source
/usr/lib/monodoc/sources/nunit-docs.tree
/usr/lib/monodoc/sources/nunit-docs.zip
/usr/share/doc/monodoc-nunit-manual
/usr/share/doc/monodoc-nunit-manual/changelog.Debian.gz
/usr/share/doc/monodoc-nunit-manual/changelog.gz
/usr/share/doc/monodoc-nunit-manual/copyright
/var/cache/apt/archives/monodoc-nunit-manual_1.0.6-3_all.deb
/var/lib/dpkg/info/monodoc-nunit-manual.list
/var/lib/dpkg/info/monodoc-nunit-manual.md5sums
/var/lib/dpkg/info/monodoc-nunit-manual.postinst
[0]tottinge@inigo:~$

What do you know? No NUnit.dll at all. I have docs galore, no nunit. How does that happen? Oh. Looks like it’s not all packaged.

I look up the maintainers’ email and send a note. Today I got back an email with this reference. I see. Okay, I don’t have a problem with the policy. However inconvenient and frustrating it is, I can see waiting for the NUnit project a little longer. I just hate learning a new language without unit tests.

If I were in the midst of a big project, and had a mandate to use C#, this would have been trouble enough that I’d have pulled down mono and built it from source. I guess that’s not a bad direction to go for now, and I’ll remove it later when the packaged NUnit is available.

These two free projects (mono and debian) don’t agree on how things should be done, and each has the freedom to go a different way. A user has the right to follow one, or the other, or to switch between them.