Tcl Source Code

[saveState] records only the list of procedure
names and variable names in use, but not their
definitions, so there's really no "restore"
capability in [restore].

Also, [restoreState] only examines [info procs]
rather than [info commands], so new commands
are not cleaned up if they are not [proc]s.

Also, the history kept by [saveState] is only
one level deep, so a second call to [saveState]
destroys the saved information from the first call.
The saved state is actually stored in a Tcl list that
could easily manage a stack.

So, the whole deal looks pretty useless to me.

The actual bugs:

1) The documentation for [saveState] and [restoreState]
   suggests they are useful if a test file
   "creates or deletes global variables or procs".
   However, as noted above, there is no real restore
   capability, so these commands can do nothing to help
   out when procs or global variables are deleted.
   Well, [restoreState] could raise an error, but it
   doesn't.

2) The documentation refers to "global variables", but
   these routines operate in the frame of their
   callers, so they operate on global variables only
   if called from level #0.  They should use
   [info globals] instead of [info vars], to operate
   as documented.

With the features of tcltest 2.x, it seems to me
that each test should be managing its own setup and
cleanup with the -setup and -cleanup options anyway.
I'd suggest deprecating [{save|restore}state].

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committed to HEAD (8.4a5)

File Added - 21328: ttstate.patch

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This patch removes documentation of [saveState] and
[restoreState] from tcltest 2.  The commands themselves
can stick around for the sake of compatibility support
for tcltest 1, but removing them from the documentation
effectively deprecates them so that new test suites will
not be encouraged to use these useless and buggy commands.

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Note that {save|restore}State only pretend to
operate on procs and variables.  These are
also the things stored in namespaces.

It is simpler and more reliable for a test suite
to create and destroy a namespace for the commands
and variables it uses, than to attempt to call on
saveState and restoreState.