test/unit: A time to maintain, and a time to hand off

Back in 2000, after having purchased a brand spanking new Pickaxe book , I was trying to figure out what to do with this shiny new Ruby thing that I’d found. Being a very test infected developer, I had tried out the current de facto Ruby unit testing framework, RubyUnit , and wasn’t terribly impressed. In retrospect, some of the things I didn’t like about it were due to my nubishness, but it was enough to make my first Ruby project a testing framework, which I dubbed Lapidary . I gave a presentation on testing at the first international Ruby conference in 2001, and pushed Lapidary while there. Lots of folks were intrigued, and Lapidary usage picked up quite a bit. Then in October of 2001, I was contacted by Masaki Suketa (RubyUnit’s maintainer) about Matz’ desire to include a unit testing package in the Ruby standard library. After various discussions back and forth, it was decided to rename Lapidary to test/unit, build a RubyUnit compatibility layer on top o...