Subject: bug#21742: 25.0.50; Document that ert-deftest expands all macros

From: immerrr again <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 23 Oct 2015 11:55:45 +0300

I wrote a library ample-regexps [1] that does some macro magic to extend
rx and ran into an issue with ert when tests started failing without any
explanation.  I started digging and here's what I found.

The library provides a macro called `define-arx` which roughly expands
to ([2])

   (eval-and-compile
     (defvar SOME-VAR ...)
     (defun SOME-FUN (...) ...)
     (defmacro SOME-MACRO (...)
       (SOME-FUN ...))
     ...)

The whole expansion is wrapped into eval-and-compile so that it can be
used in a library during byte-compilation.

I wrote a macro to use in tests that expands to roughly

  (progn
    (define-arx ...)
    (unwind-protect
        ,@body
      (fmakunbound SOME-MACRO)
      (fmakunbound SOME-FUN)
      (makunbound SOME-VAR)))

The macro worked when executed manually, but not during tests.

I started grepping and xref-ing through the code till I found that
ert-deftest includes cl-macrolet which in turn runs macroexpand-all on
the test definition.  Quite expectedly, it expands the define-arx macro
that results in eval-and-compile which is also expanded and all that's
left in the resulting test definition is a symbol.  More importantly,
all side effects, i.e. function/macro definitions happen during test
definition while they should really happen during test execution.

I ended up using (eval (quote (define-arx ...))) to prevent early
expansion, but it would really be nice if this was documented (would
have saved me an hour-something of what-is-going-on and couple hours of
how-do-i-stop-that).  Or if that expansion didn't happen in the first
place, but I guess that's not easy since it does that to expand all the
(should ...) forms and test helpers to improve test run time.

1. https://github.com/immerrr/ample-regexps.el
2. https://github.com/immerrr/ample-regexps.el/blob/8368cc16e724cea1f60755fe40e25fe374b24418/ample-regexps.el#L339-L371

In GNU Emacs 25.0.50.10 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.4.2)
 of 2015-10-12
Repository revision: 149066dbfc7f11c40f6dbed70a3279153bf3ab7a
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