Thomas Tuegel <ttue...@gmail.com> writes: > There have been two separate suggestions (of which I am aware) of ways > to integrate tests into Cabal. One is to build the tests into their > own executable which uses an error code on exit to indicate test > failure.
I personally prefer this suggestion: for my graphviz library at least, I define at least one QuickCheck property that I cannot as yet actually use (as my Arbitrary instances aren't guaranteed to produce valid Dot code, so I can't run the test that attempts to pass a value through to dot/neato). > I propose to build a test suite as its own executable, but to avoid > the problem of granularity by producing an output file detailing the > success or failure of individual tests and any relevant error > messages. The format of the file would be standardized through > library routines I propose to write; these routines would run tests > with HUnit or QuickCheck and process them into a common format. > Cabal, or any other utility, could read this file to determine the > state of the test suite. Perhaps Cabal could even warn the user about > installing packages with failing tests. All well and good, but your sample code (which I've ommitted for the sake of brevity) doesn't seem to lead to much room for customisation: for graphviz's test suite, I include various comments about the purpose of the test, etc. as well as changing some of QuickCheck's paramaters; does your proposal allow the inclusion of such customisations? As an aside, I question the necessity of this kind of proposal: how many people actually run tests for packages they download from Hackage? graphviz's test suite runs for 110 minutes, and I mainly use it to test that my changes/inclusions in what it prints and parses is consistent: I don't expect a user to bother running it (and would question why anyone would). How does the inclusion of a "test" option to Cabal allow any substantial benefits to developers over building the package with a build-time flag to enable building a test suite? -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic ivan.miljeno...@gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
