Installing
The BTD suite is distributed as a package, meaning that after
downloading and unzipping you will find a main directory 'btd'
with a number of subdirectories. This main directory should be
copied to a place where it can be picked up by the Lua path.
Introduction to BTD
BTD is meant to be a set of tools which will help in the
development of software, based on existing or new tools.
The main idea behind it is :
- prepare a 'clean' environment
- copy all relevant code to this environment
- do preprocessing of code
- test code
- compile code
- package code
The steps not necessarily in this order; not all steps are
required; more steps may be inserted.
Why use BTD ?
For the moment only test components of the suit are fully
operational. Which is probably the most important part because it
allows to verify the workings of a program in an operator
unattended way. This is all the more important in a dynamic
language environment where no compile-time checking is done. Or,
errors will only be noticed during run-time.
Eventually BTD will allow to initiate a build/test/deploy cycle
on some aplication and return with a package that can be deployed
on a machine with Lua installed or alternatively with a log
describing the errors in the program.
Using BTD
There are plenty of resources on the internet which explain why
and give best practices to the use of automated testing.