Merb devel - Jan 2008 - Making failing view specs easier to troubleshoot

I just had a problem that had me stumped for an hour.  All of a sudden
all of my view specs were failing, and I couldn''t get good
troubleshooting information from the rspec output.  The output from
running `rake specs` was a bunch of HTML from
app/views/exceptions/internal_server_error.html.erb, but there wasn''t
enough info there to diagnose my problem.  It just said "Internal
server error" and had no stack trace.  (And no, using `rake specs
--trace` wouldn''t help in this case.)

The thing that had me absolutely stumped was that the views all worked
fine when I ran `merb -e test` and checked them out with my browser.
What could possibly have gone wrong?  It turns out that I was using
`session[]` in a before filter in my Application controller, but
`session[]` is undefined when rspec runs.

I finally figured out the problem by making
internal_server_error.html.erb show detailed error messages, which is
apparently off when running rspec.  After I replaced ''if
show_details''
with ''if true'', I finally got a stack trace in the HTML.  Even
then
the output was hard to read, so I wrote the contents of @body to a
file and opened that in my browser.  That enabled me to see the small
problem quickly.

Maybe show_details should be set to true when running rspec, and maybe
internal_server_error.html.erb could have a simple <pre> block with
error messages and a stack trace inside.  The latter would be
redundant, but it would aid debugging enormously when reading rspec
output in a console.

http://merb.devjavu.com/ticket/451