Coming soon after the upstream procps 3.3.0 being released, the Debian packages have been uploaded tonight. The Debian packages have had the added benefit of being a day late by having a tiny 2 line patch to stop pgrep from crashing.
One regression that is on purpose, watch is currently not 8-bit clean again until I can sort out how to get the linking right with the new build process.
Testing Systems
The embarrassing problem with pgrep did start a discussion about testing, especially regression testing. I’ve recently started using unit testing in my python programs and love the level of assurance those tests give me that I haven’t broken anything (to a degree anyhow). I’d really like to be able to type “make test” and have each of the programs run through a series of tests.
The problem with packages like procps (psmisc too) is that you really need to test the entire program, not just a stub, and that the program needs access to a know level of /proc. The only thing I have seen that is even remotely what is needed is the bunch of scripts that coreutils uses which creates dummy files and directories to operate the commands on. I expect we could do something similar with some scripts that create a known process but if anyone has a better idea about how to test a command line program let me know.
