My situation: My business has a legacy codebase of hundreds of thousands of lines of poorly maintained Perl. We're writing new (Perl) code to take the place of this, bit by bit.

In one of my bits, I need to call a function from the original codebase; it's just too complicated to rewrite into the new system. I know that on all of our platforms--test, staging, production--I'll have access to the original, so I can say "use lib /path/to/orig; my $foo = Old::Codebase::complicated_function();". However, there's no way to do this in a test environment, because the old codebase is highly interdependent, and I can't import the entire thing into git just to have it around for the test.

How do I get around this? I don't need to test the old function; I can assume that it works. But I need to test the rest of the module, and it will fail if it can't find /path/to/orig. (That is, I can't just SKIP the test; the function will need to be called whenever the module runs.) I assume this is a regular problem, but haven't been able to find an answer.

In reply to Testing without linking to legacy codebase by Anonymous Monk

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