Re: Participation in Mauve

[Tom Tromey <tromey at redhat dot com>]

>>>>> "Gerrit" == Gerrit Ruelens <gerrit.ruelens@acunia.com> writes:

Gerrit> We would like to contribute our effort back into Mauve
Gerrit> project, but along the way we slightly altered the TestHarness
Gerrit> and ended up with an altered SimpleTestHarness.

One thing to know is that SimpleTestHarness is just one possible test
harness.  You could always write another one that follows the correct
API.  That's what we do in libgcj.

However, that also isn't a requirement...

Gerrit> 1.due to the system we are testing, we read files not as an
Gerrit> RandomAccessFile but by using getSystemResourceAsStream.
Gerrit> Since this change is made in the SimpleTestHarness this will
Gerrit> be no cause real problems.

It might cause problems for our testing.  I'm not positive.

Maybe we can make the behavior conditional on a switch of some kind,
either to configure or to the test harness itself.

I've been thinking of redoing the build process so that decisions are
made by configure and not via the ugly `KEYS'-at-make-time mechanism
we now use.

Gerrit> 2.We added an abstract function void setclass(String
Gerrit> classname) to the TestHarness.

Do you call this with the name of the class you are testing or the
name of the class you are writing?  If the latter we could just
automate this.

Gerrit> 3.We changed the way how checks handle a String message.  All
Gerrit> those calls are directed to check(boolean b, String msg).  The
Gerrit> checkPoint method isn't called anymore by those methods
Gerrit> ... (the checkPoint stays the same)

Why?

Gerrit> 4.We changed the methods which reported the output to the
Gerrit> screen in the SimpleTestHarness

Gerrit> The purpose of points 2 to 4 is to generate a uniform message
Gerrit> structure.

This sounds good.  But could we make it a switch?  I'd like the
default to be something "human readable" (whatever that means -- I'm
ok with changing the default format if you think it is ugly).

Tom