Miscellaneous features
* Added expected failures support to test cases and atf-run. These
include, for example, expected clean exits, expected reception of fatal
signals, expected timeouts and expected errors in condition checks.
These statuses can be used to denote test cases that are known to fail
due to a bug in the code they are testing. atf-report reports these
tests separately but they do not count towards the failed test cases
amount.
* Added the ATF_CHECK_ERRNO and ATF_REQUIRE_ERRNO to the C library to
allow easy checking of call failures that update errno.
* Added the has.cleanup meta-data property to test caes that specifies
whether the test case has a cleanup routine or not; its value is
automatically set. This property is read by atf-run to know if it has to
run the cleanup routine; skipping this run for every test case
significantly speeds up the run time of test suites.
* Reversed the order of the ATF_CHECK_THROW macro in the C++ binding to
take the expected exception as the first argument and the statement to
execute as the second argument.
Changes in atf-check
* Changed atf-check to support negating the status and output checks by
prefixing them with not- and added support to specify multiple checkers
for stdout and stderr, not only one.
* Added the match output checker to atf-check to look for regular
expressions in the stdout and stderr of commands.
* Modified the exit checks in atf-check to support checking for the
reception of signals.
Code simplifications and cleanups
* Removed usage messages from test programs to simplify the
implementation of every binding by a significant amount. They just now
refer the user to the appropriate manual page and do not attempt to wrap
lines on terminal boundaries. Test programs are not supposed to be run
by users directly so this minor interface regression is not important.
* Removed the atf-format internal utility, which is unused after the
change documented above.
* Removed the atf-cleanup internal utility. It has been unused since the
test case isolation was moved to atf-run in 0.8
* Splitted the Makefile.am into smaller files for easier maintenance and
dropped the use of M4. Only affects users building from the repository
sources.
* Intermixed tests with the source files in the source tree to provide
them more visibility and easier access. The tests directory is gone from
the source tree and tests are now suffixed by _test, not prefixed by t_.
* Simplifications to the atf-c library: removed the io, tcr and ui
modules as they had become unnecessary after all simplifications
introduced since the 0.8 release.
* Removed the application/X-atf-tcr format introduced in 0.8 release.
Tests now print a much simplified format that is easy to parse and nicer
to read by end users. As a side effect, the default for test cases is
now to print their results to stdout unless otherwise stated by providing
the -r flag.
* Removed XML distribution documents and replaced them with plain-text
documents. They provided little value and introduced a lot of complexity
to the build system.
* Simplified the output of atf-version by not attempting to print a
revision number when building form a distfile. Makes the build system
easier to maintain.
Experimental version released on June 3rd, 2010.
* Added atf-sh, an interpreter to process test programs written using
the shell API. This is not really a shell interpreter by itself
though: it is just a wrapper around the system shell that eases the
loading of the necessary ATF libraries.
* Removed atf-compile in favour of atf-sh.
* Added the use.fs metadata property to test case, which is used to
specify which test cases require file system access. This is to
highlight dependencies on external resources more clearly and to speed
up the execution of test suites by skipping the creation of many
unnecessary work directories.
* Fixed test programs to get a sane default value for their source
directory. This means that it should not be necessary any more to pass
-s when running test programs that do not live in the current
directory.
* Defining test case headers became optional. This is trivial to achieve
in shell-based tests but a bit ugly in C and C++. In C, use the new
ATF_TC_WITHOUT_HEAD macro to define the test case, and in C++ use
ATF_TEST_CASE_WITHOUT_HEAD.
Experimental version released on May 7th, 2010.
* Test programs no longer run several test cases in a row. The execution
of a test program now requires a test case name, and that single test
case is executed. To execute several test cases, use the atf-run
utility as usual.
* Test programs no longer fork a subprocess to isolate the execution of
test cases. They run the test case code in-process, and a crash of the
test case will result in a crash of the test program. This is to ease
debugging of faulty test cases.
* Test programs no longer isolate their test cases. This means that they
will not create temporary directories nor sanitize the environment any
more. Yes: running a test case that depends on system state by hand
will most likely yield different results depending on where (machine,
directory, user environment, etc.) it is run. Isolation has been moved
to atf-run.
* Test programs no longer print a cryptic format (application/X-atf-tcs)
on a special file channel. They can now print whatever they want on
the screen. Because test programs can now only run one test case every
time, providing controlled output is not necessary any more.
* Test programs no longer write their status into a special file
descriptor. Instead, they create a file with the results, which is
later parsed by atf-run. This changes the semantics of the -r flag.
* atf-run has been adjusted to perform the test case isolation. As a
result, there is now a single canonical place that implements the
isolation of test caes. In previous releases, the three language
bindings (C, C++ and shell) had to be kept in sync with each other
(read: not a nice thing to do at all). As a side effect of this
change, writing bindings for other languages will be much, much easier
from now on.
* atf-run forks test programs on a test case basis, instead of on a test
program basis as it did before. This is to provide the test case
isolation that was before implemented by the test programs themselves.
* Removed the atf-exec tool. This was used to implement test case
isolation in atf-sh, but it is now unnecessary.
* It is now optional to define the descr meta-data property. It has been
proven to be mostly useless, because test cases often carry a
descriptive name of their own.
* Added build-time checks to atf-c and atf-c++. A binding for atf-sh
will come later.
* Migrated all build-time checks for header files to proper ATF tests.
This demonstrates the use of the new feature described above.
* Added an internal API for child process management.
* Converted all plain-text distribution documents to a Docbook canonical
version, and include pre-generated plain text and HTML copies in the
distribution file.
* Simplified the contents of the Makefile.am by regenerating it from a
canonical Makefile.am.m4 source. As a side-effect, some dependency
specifications were fixed.
* Migrated all checks from the check target to installcheck, as these
require ATF to be installed.
* Fixed sign comparison mismatches triggered by the now-enabled
-Wsign-compare.
* Fixed many memory and object leaks.
Release date: January 18th, 2009
Status: Experimental
* Make atf-exec be able to kill its child process after a certain period of
time; this is controlled through the new -t option.
* Change atf-sh to use atf-exec's -t option to control the test case's
timeouts, instead of doing it internally. Same behavior as before, but
noticeably faster.
* atf-exec's -g option and atf-killpg are gone due to the previous change.
* Added the atf-check(1) tool, a program that executes a given command and
checks its exit code against a known value and allows the management of
stdout and stderr in multiple ways. This replaces the previous atf_check
function in the atf-sh library and exposes this functionality to both
atf-c and atf-c++.
* Added the ATF_REQUIRE family of macros to the C interface. These help
in checking for fatal test conditions. The old ATF_CHECK macros now
perform non-fatal checks only. I.e. by using ATF_CHECK, the test case
can now continue its execution and the failures will not be reported
until the end of the whole run.
* Extended the amount of ATF_CHECK_* C macros with new ones to provide more
features to the developer. These also have their corresponding
counterparts in the ATF_REQUIRE_* family. The new macros (listing the
suffixes only) are: _EQ (replaces _EQUAL), _EQ_MSG, _STREQ and
_STREQ_MSG.
Release date: May 1st, 2008
Status: Experimental
* Clauses 3 and 4 of the BSD license used by the project were dropped.
All the code is now under a 2-clause BSD license compatible with the
GNU General Public License (GPL).
* Added a C-only binding so that binary test programs do not need to be
tied to C++ at all. This binding is now known as the atf-c library.
* Renamed the C++ binding to atf-c++ for consistency with the new atf-c.
* Renamed the POSIX shell binding to atf-sh for consistency with the new
atf-c and atf-c++.
* Added a -w flag to test programs through which it is possible to specify
the work directory to be used. This was possible in prior releases by
defining the workdir configuration variable (-v workdir=...), but was a
conceptually incorrect mechanism.
* Test programs now preserve the execution order of test cases when they
are given in the command line. Even those mentioned more than once are
executed multiple times to comply with the user's requests.
Changes:
* Added two new manual pages, atf-c++-api and atf-sh-api, describing the
C++ and POSIX shell interfaces used to write test programs.
* Added a pkg-config file, useful to get the flags to build against the
C++ library or to easily detect the presence of ATF.
* Added a way for test cases to require a specific architecture and/or
machine type through the new 'require.arch' and 'require.machine'
meta-data properties, respectively.
* Added the 'timeout' property to test cases, useful to set an upper-bound
limit for the test's run time and thus prevent global test program stalls
due to the test case's misbehavior.
* Added the atf-exec(1) internal utility, used to execute a command after
changing the process group it belongs to.
* Added the atf-killpg(1) internal utility, used to kill process groups.
* Multiple portability fixes. Of special interest, full support for SunOS
(Solaris Express Developer Edition 2007/09) using the Sun Studio 12 C++
compiler.
* Fixed a serious bug that prevented atf-run(1) from working at all under
Fedora 8 x86_64. Due to the nature of the bug, other platforms were
likely affected too.
* Added XML output support to atf-report. This is accompanied by a DTD for
the format's structure and sample XSLT/CSS files to post-process this
output and convert it to a plain HTML report.
* Changed atf-run to add system information to the report it generates.
This is currently used by atf-report's XML output only, and is later
printed in the HTML reports in a nice and useful summary table. The user
and system administrator are allowed to tune this feature by means of
hooks.
* Removed the test cases' 'isolated' property. This was intended to avoid
touching the file system at all when running the related test case, but
this has not been true for a long while: some control files are
unconditionally required for several purposes, and we cannot easily get
rid of them. This way we remove several critical and delicate pieces of
code.
* Improved atf-report's CSV output format to include information about
test programs too.
* Fixed the tests that used atf-compile to not require this tool as a
helper. Avoids systems without build-time utilities to skip many tests
that could otherwise be run. (E.g. NetBSD without the comp.tgz set
installed.)
* Many general cleanups: Fixed many pieces of code marked as ugly and/or
incomplete.
* Test cases now get a known umask on entry.
* atf-run now detects many unexpected failures caused by test programs
and reports them as bogus tests. atf-report is able to handle these
new errors and nicely reports them to the user.
* All the data formats read and written by the tools have been
documented and cleaned up. These include those grammars that define
how the different components communicate with each other as well as
the format of files written by the developers and users: the Atffiles
and the configuration files.
* Added the atf-version tool, a utility that displays information about
the currently installed version of ATF.
* Test cases can now define an optional cleanup routine to undo their
actions regardless of their exit status.
* atf-report now summarizes the list of failed (bogus) test programs
when using the ticker output format.
* Test programs now capture some termination signals and clean up any
temporary files before exiting the program.
* Multiple bug fixes and improvements all around.
The Automated Testing Framework (ATF) is a collection of libraries and
utilities designed to ease unattended application testing in the hands of
developers and end users of a specific piece of software.
As regards developers, ATF provides the necessary means to easily create
test suites composed of multiple test programs, which in turn are a
collection of test cases. It also attempts to simplify the debugging of
problems when these test cases detect an error by providing as much
information as possible about the failure.
As regards users, it simplifies the process of running the test suites and,
in special, encourages end users to run them often: they do not need to
have source trees around nor any other development tools installed to be
able to certify that a given piece of software works on their machine as
advertised.
Yes, these are (part of) the results of my SoC 2007 project :-)
