Dariusz on Software

Recently I've joined new project targetting STB (set top boxes). STB is a networking device (Ethernet based) that allows you to watch (record in some cases) HD films on your TV screen. I have no TV device in home (who cares TV if Internet is availabe?), but it's interesting to see the direction where current TV devices will go in near future.

Anyway, the most important difference to previous projects is "new" language: no more Java, no more Python, it's C++. You can find few C++ projects I published on SourceForge, but they're created >5 years old now, so I can use "new" word here ;-). The first thought of old Test Driven Design fan when creating development environment was: whre's JUnit for C++?

CppUnit

CppUnit is the most known port of Junit to C++ world. It's pretty mature, full-featured (am I hearing "fat"?) and ... verbose. See the code example:

// Simplest possible test with CppUnit
#include
class SimplestCase : public CPPUNIT_NS::TestFixture
{
    CPPUNIT_TEST_SUITE( SimplestCase );
    CPPUNIT_TEST( MyTest );
    CPPUNIT_TEST_SUITE_END();
protected:
    void MyTest();
};

CPPUNIT_TEST_SUITE_REGISTRATION( SimplestCase );  

void SimplestCase::MyTest()
{
    float fnum = 2.00001f;
    CPPUNIT_ASSERT_DOUBLES_EQUAL( fnum, 2.0f, 0.0005 );
}

It's very verbose, indeed. Initially, I wanted to go in that direction but noticed much simpler syntax for declaring tests:

#include "lib/TestHarness.h"  

TEST (Whatever,MyTest)
{
    float fnum = 2.00001f;
    CHECK_DOUBLES_EQUAL (fnum, 2.0f);
}

What was the library?

CppUnitLite

CppUnitLite was written by Michael Feathers, the original author of CppUnit, who decided to leave CppUnit and write something smaller / lighter (do you know this feeling ;-) ). That's why CppUnitLite was born.

CppUnit automatically discovers test cases based on TEST macro and organizes those tests into test suites. Small original code modications allows us to run:

• single test
• single test suite
• any combination of above

I see GoogleTest uses similar syntax for tests declarations. We will switch in the future if CppUnitLite features become too small for our requirements. At this very moment all needs are fulfilled:

• simple, easy to use syntax
• many assertions for comparing results
• light (important for embedded device)

Do you know of another C++ library that is worth considering?

Sometimes you need to make some directories available (R/W mode) to a group of developers on a Linux / Unix server. Using shell tools make this task very easy.

First, ensure all files group are switched to desired group:

find . ! -group group1 -exec chgrp group1 '{}' \;

Then +s (sticky) bit must be attached to directories to ensure group will be preserved in newly created directories:

find . -type d ! -perm -g=s -exec chmod g+s '{}' \;

Then writeability for the group should be set:

find . -type d ! -perm -g=w -exec chmod g+w '{}' \;

And finally some users must be added to the group:

adduser user1 group1

Additionally you have to set default umask to 0002 (only o+w filtered out). It's done by installing libpam-umask and adding to /etc/pam.d/common-session:

session    optional     pam_umask.so umask=002

That's all.