Item7525: All PluginHandlerTests fail with bad shell syntax

/bin/cp: cannot stat ‘/media/haj/linuxdevel/twiki/trunk/core/data/TWiki/{WebPreferences,TWikiPreferences}.txt’: No such file or directory

Maybe some operating systems have a cp command which evaluates {WebPreferences,TWikiPreferences} as a list, but Ubuntu doesn't.

The shell commands have been added for Item6870 as a fix to the symptom that unit tests fail to copy the TWiki web. Ouch. I just reported that in Item7523. Unfortunately, the fix only treats the symptom and not the root cause, and it doesn't work for me.

The idea to have a "minimal" copy of the TWiki web for test purposes is quite fine, but I suggest that the implementation abandons the system call.

• Minimal improvement: Use File::Copy instead of bin/cp and use an explicit loop over the files needed instead of non-portable shell syntax.
• Better: Have a unit test utility function which copies the relevant parts of the TWiki web. According to Item6870 quite a couple of test cases want to do this, so it is a candidate for factoring into TWikiTestCase.pm.

I'm currently going through the unit tests alphabetically, but from the SVN reports I assume that the same problem will hit me with PrefsTests and RegisterTests, too. -- TWiki:Main/HaraldJoerg - 2014-06-22

Ok, this patch is too long for a comment - it is attached (%ATTACHURL%/item7525.patch). In addition to PluginHandlerTests, PrefsTests and RegisterTests it also covers EmptyTests, so that Item7523 can no longer be tested by using the example code.

-- TWiki:Main.HaraldJoerg - 2014-06-23