Yodel: Communicable Elisp ⛰🎶⛰

Yodel-ay-hee-why?

The purpose of this package is to make it easier to reproduce elisp bugs. Bug reproduction cases often follow this pattern:

Given file "foo" with the following contents:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
foo bar baz
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Execute the following:
1. do this
2. do that
3. do this

This is error prone and inefficient. It requires anyone on the other end to prepare the test environment and manually execute the reproduction steps. One also has to ensure their elisp environment is clean (ideally only having the minimal set of packages needed installed and freshly loaded).

Yodel-ay-hee-what?

Yodel allows one to send a declarative form which describes the elisp environment and a program to execute within that environment. Others may execute the form on their system and compare results easily via consistently formatted reports.

For example, evaluating the following:

(yodel
  :post*
  (yodel-file
    :point "|"
    :with* "test: |fail"
    :then*
    (kill-word 1)
    (insert "pass")
    (message "%s" (buffer-string))))

results in the following report when using the org report formatter:

* YODEL REPORT [2021-09-08 17:51]

#+begin_src emacs-lisp :lexical t
(yodel
  :post*
  (yodel-file
    :point "|"
    :with* "test: |fail"
    :then*
    (kill-word 1)
    (insert "pass")
    (message "%s"
             (buffer-string))))
#+end_src

** STDOUT:

#+begin_src emacs-lisp :lexical t
test: pass
#+end_src

** Environment

- =emacs version=: GNU Emacs 28.0.50 (build 1, x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit, cairo version 1.17.4, Xaw3d scroll bars)
 of 2021-09-04
- =system type=: gnu/linux

Reformatting reports is as easy as M-x yodel-reformat. Yodel offers out-of-the-box formatters for:

• Github
• Reddit
• Org
• Mailing lists

Yodel-ay-hee-how?

Yodel is currently only available via this repository.

Install with straight.el

(straight-use-package '(yodel :host github :repo "progfolio/yodel"))

(side note: The inspiration for yodel is straight.el’s straight-bug-report)

Install manually

• Clone this repository
• Add it to your load-path
• (require 'yodel)

NOTICE

Yodel is still in early development. API is experimental at this time.