The more I test, the more problems I seem to come up with. Over the past few days, I was running into more and more problems testing a superclass. This particular class should not be instantiated. Instead, it provides a set of common methods for subclasses. However, I broke my own rule and instantiated it directly for my tests. This wound up causing me no end of subtle problems with my test suite and I found myself writing weird testing hooks directly into the superclass, moving them back out to the tests, and then ran into even more bugs.
I solved this by creating a dummy subclass in my test suite and then ran into the problem of Perl not allowing data inheritence. Now I have class methods to provide easy access to the class data, but that allows calling programs to get at this data. I suppose I could try to export the class data into the subclass, but that seems even worse (and still allows the calling programs to get at the data). I think I'll stick with the class methods and simply remind people in the documentation that being able to access this stuff doesn't mean that they should.
-Dom
