Bug fix for Ellen's Alien game in python

alatiera · January 8, 2023, 10:16pm

Hi,

(Feel free to move the post to the proper category)

I’ve noticed a bug in Ellen’s Allien game tests, where they would pass when they shouldn’t. I opened a github PR but it was autocloses by the bot, suggesting I’d post about it in here.

github.com/exercism/python

Improve test for Ellen's Alien game

exercism:main ← alatiera:alatiera/alien-game

opened 10:04PM - 08 Jan 23 UTC

alatiera

+1 -1

The test is using a zip iterator from the expected input `position_data` and out…put, `obj_list`, returned by the user's new_aliens_collection implementation. However the zip is not Strict, meaning that if the user provided a list with less objects than the expected output, the test would still pass. For example: `return [Alien(x,y)]`. Call the zip() function with the strict argument, so that it will error out if the `obj_list` doesn't match the length of the `position_data`.

I would appreciate a review, its an one liner change with a proper commit message. I’d be happy to help any way I can the maintainers if anything comes up during review.

Thanks for all the thankless and hard work over the years! Feel free to review it when you get a breather, there is no rush.

A fellow oss maintainer :)

IsaacG · January 8, 2023, 11:02pm

This is a good catch!

Given that the repo is not accepting PRs at this time, it might be better to ask if the maintainers are interested in a PRs rather than asking that they review a PR.
If there is an interest in a PR, rather than having zip raise an exception with a potentially confusing message, it might be better to explicitly tests lengths and have an exception message more tailored to the exercise.

alatiera · January 9, 2023, 2:02pm

Indeed you are right, I was assuming it was more related of along the lines of new contributions/features rather than tiny bugfixes, but I shouldn’t have.

Yea I that’s a good idea, I wouldn’t mind doing that.