[ANN] specl 9 released

[Gary Vaughan <gary@...>]

Behaviour Driven Development for Lua

I am happy to announce release 9 of Specl.

Specl's home page is at http://gvvaughan.github.io/specl

* Noteworthy changes in release 9 (2013-12-09) [stable]

** New features:

  - Vastly improved error diagnostics for syntax errors in spec
    files, reporting filename and line-number of error locations,
    and without spurious Lua-runtime stack traces.

  - Support for custom per-matcher adaptors. See docs/specl.md for
    documentation.

  - New 'a_permutation_of' adaptor for contain matcher, that allows
    expectations for operations that are inherently unordered:

      t = {}
      for _, v in pairs (a_big_table) do t[#t + 1] = v end
      expect (a_big_table).should_contain.a_permutation_of (t)

    It will fail unless the same set of elements are present in the
    expect argument values, or the expect argument keys; like the
    other 'contain' adaptors it works with strings and objects too.

  - New '--unicode' command-line option to support unicode in spec
    files, at the expense of inaccurate line-numbers in error
    messages.

  - Works correctly without ansicolors installed (albeit without
    displaying any color!).

  - If 'luaposix' is installed where Specl can find it, the report
    and progress formatters will use it to display the time spent
    running specifications much more accurately.

** Incompatible changes:

  - Requires lyaml 4 or newer.

  - Unicode characters in spec files are no longer supported by
    default. LibYAML counts indices by character when reporting the
    offsets used to re-extract the Lua code fragments (i.e. without
    YAML neline folding) that Specl uses to generate correct line-
    numbers in error-messages.  Lua string operations require byte
    offsets, which are incompatible.

  - When using std.objects, the contain matcher now displays the
    expected object type name (rather than just: "table") from the
    FAIL report.

** Bug fixes:

  - Help2man is no longer required to install specl from the
    distribution tarball.


Install it with LuaRocks, using:

    luarocks install specl 9

Until the rocks are available from the official repository in a few days,
you can install directly from the specl release branch, with:

    $ luarocks install \
    http://raw.github.com/gvvaughan/specl/release-v9/specl-9-1.rockspec