Sharing is key in Open Source

#opensource #go #ssg #testing

This week, me and my partner Eakam tested each others projects and shared the issues via GitHub. I saw he wanted to find a partner in Slack channel, so I messaged him and we started working.

It was actually pretty interesting getting to test someone else's software, and it surely wasn't as easy as I anticipated. There is definitely a lot of creativity needed to be a successful tester, and from this point on I have started to respect Quality Assurance people even more.

Eakam did a good job when testing my project, discovering many issues that I couldn't even think of. For example, my -i flag actually accepted anything that was starting with i, like -info. This is a major oversight, and to be honest I partly blame the library I was using. There is a lot of engineering I still have to do to figure out how to fix this on my side.

Here are the issues that I filed on Eakam's GitHub:

Include features that the tool offers to the README - I noticed that the ReadMe did not have any Features listed, so I thought it would be nice to add some.
Add more logging - When I started his tool, I noticed there wasn't really feedback if the generation goes as planned, and I think it would be nice to have some logs.
Executable doesn't work without HTML template file - This one I feel like is a major issue, because if the tool is called from a different directory, it won't build anything because it lack HTML template.
Add some of the optional features - Here I really was running out of ideas because Eakam's project was great, nothing really to say. Unfinished, but great!
Display --version from a variable - In possible future releases the version might get lost in code, so it would be nice to have it serialized somewhere or used from Cargo package.

Here are some issues Eakam found:

Update Readme to include usage options - Finished ReadMe is everything! Glad I was able to quickly add it.
Exit without deleting previous output files if entered path is not a .txt file - My tool actually deletes previous compilations even if the input is invalid. It will be a hard fix and I will have to still work on this.
Update usage command to account for specific terminals - On Eakam's system 'ssgo' keyword actually didn't work! He had to use './ssgo'. Glad it's an easy fix though.
Make invalid flag help message consistent with help flag message - The texts in help message and when you enter a wrong flag differs. Easy fix.
[BUG] Check for invalid flags starting with '-i'
- My shorthand flag -i for input has a bug, accepting -info flag as -i nfo. That's a hard fix, as I am using a separate library for flags, and will have to do engineering to overcome this.