Julius Plenz – Blog

The standard book Perl Best Practices advises in chapter 4.5 that one should use the Readonly Perl module instead of the constant standard module for various reasons.

An example might look like this:

package Myprogram;

use Exporter;
use Readonly;
our @EXPORT = qw(conffile);
Readonly our $BASEPATH => "$ENV{HOME}/.myprogram";

sub conffile { "$BASEPATH/config.ini" }

If you want to unit test your program now, you cannot just mess around and replace a potentially existing config file with a bogous one. You have to create a temporary directory and use that as the base path. That is, you have to modify your Readonly declared variable. I’ve not seen this documented, so I guess this might help others: Internally the method Readonly::Scalar::STORE is called when you do an assignment (see man perltie for details). In Readonly.pm, this is redefined to

*STORE = *UNTIE = sub {Readonly::croak $Readonly::MODIFY};

which dies with an error message. So you only have to circumvent this. The method STORE gets a reference of the location as first argument, and the value as second argument. So a quick-and-dirty workaround is just setting

*Readonly::Scalar::STORE = sub { ${$_[0]} = $_[1]; };

prior to assigning to the Readonly variable. If you want to do it properly, you should only change this locally in the block where you re-assign the value, so that subsequent attempts will again produce the usual error message. Such a test might look like this:

use strict;
use warnings;

use Test::More 'no_plan';

use Myprogram;

{
    no warnings 'redefine';
    local *Readonly::Scalar::STORE = sub { ${$_[0]} = $_[1]; };
    $Myprogram::BASEPATH = "/tmp";
}

is(Myprogram::conffile, "/tmp/config.ini", "get config filename");

For non-scalar values, this will probably work similar. (Read the source if in doubt.)