elefevre/shrinkwrap — comment on commit 0d1c001fa02bfcffb1ac9546f62e83c26abe9e3a
File:  line 0
By elefevre:

I agree that you lose the context in the logs. However, I do not believe that they are worth the trouble of writing, maintaining and reading (when maintaining the code). Personally, when I get an error in the command line or Jenkins, I rarely go check the logs. I immediately open Eclipse. I should also add that I tend to run my tests under Eclipse very often, which reduces the need to check out the logs even more.
(on a related topic, I don't like the @After println in the test -- a real test should not write anything; I haven't had the heart to delete it yet)

A directly related (I think) issue is that the assertions being used are not explicit enough. assertNotNull and assertTrue are especially guilty of that. In most cases, we can probably replace them with assertThat() clauses. In some cases, we'll have to create our own Hamcrest matchers to get much clearer error.
Typically, assertTrue(getArchive().contains(PATH_1)) would be replaced by assertThat(getArchive(), contains(PATH_1)).

So, that's also something I'd like to do. In the meantime, I believe that the current messages are not pulling their weight. And surely, as a beginner, I would have been the person to benefit most from them.

Hm... I really should write a blog post about all this some time.