[darcs-users] Improving tests

Mark Stosberg mark at summersault.com
Mon Mar 30 16:31:19 UTC 2009


> Lately there was a discussion on #darcs about improving the automated
> tests for darcs. I intend to do some work on this at the darcs hacking
> sprint next month, and I seek some input on what sort of improvement
> you'd like to see the 

My suggestion for improving the tests is to use the standard TAP output
format. The Perl tests used to do this. There are a number of tools
and additional automations that become possible or easy when this is
done.

There is a library to help easily do this with shell scripts:
http://testanything.org/wiki/index.php/Tap-functions

Darcs used to ship the flexible 'prove' utility, which is flexible test 
script execution tool. It allows you express things like:

- highlight the test failures with color
- Provide minimal output, except for failures. Give verbose output for
  those
- Rerun just the tests which failed the last time we ran 'prove'.

TAP has also been ported to Haskell, so it could be used for the unit
tests as well:

http://testanything.org/wiki/index.php/HaskellTapModule

The result could be that 'prove' is used as single test harness to drive
both the unit and functional tests with a consistent interface.

    Mark
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