Major changes between releases Automated Testing Framework =========================================================================== Changes in version 0.12 *********************** Experimental version released on November 7th, 2010. * Added the ATF_REQUIRE_THROW_RE to atf-c++, which is the same as ATF_REQUIRE_THROW but allows checking for the validity of the exception's error message by means of a regular expression. * Added the ATF_REQUIRE_MATCH to atf-c++, which allows checking for a regular expression match in a string. * Changed the default timeout for test cases from 5 minutes to 30 seconds. 30 seconds is long enough for virtually all tests to complete, and 5 minutes is a way too long pause in a test suite where a single test case stalls. * Deprecated the use.fs property. While this seemed like a good idea in the first place to impose more control on what test cases can do, it turns out to be bad. First, use.fs=false prevents bogus test cases from dumping core so after-the-fact debugging is harder. Second, supporting use.fs adds a lot of unnecessary complexity. atf-run will now ignore any value provided to use.fs and will allow test cases to freely access the file system if they wish to. * Added the atf_tc_get_config_var_as_{bool,long}{,_wd} functions to the atf-c library. The 'text' module became private in 0.11 but was being used externally to simplify the parsing of configuration variables. * Made atf-run recognize the 'unprivileged-user' configuration variable and automatically drop root privileges when a test case sets require.user=unprivileged. Note that this is, by no means, done for security purposes; this is just for user convenience; tests should, in general, not be blindly run as root in the first place. Changes in version 0.11 *********************** Experimental version released on October 20th, 2010. * The ATF_CHECK* macros in atf-c++ were renamed to ATF_REQUIRE* to match their counterparts in atf-c. * Clearly separated the modules in atf-c that are supposed to be public from those that are implementation details. The header files for the internal modules are not installed any more. * Made the atf-check tool private. It is only required by atf-sh and being public has the danger of causing confusion. Also, making it private simplifies the public API of atf. * Changed atf-sh to enable per-command error checking (set -e) by default. This catches many cases in which a test case is broken but it is not reported as such because execution continues. * Fixed the XSTL and CSS stylesheets to support expected failures. Changes in version 0.10 *********************** Experimental version released on July 2nd, 2010. 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. Changes in version 0.9 ********************** 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. Changes in version 0.8 ********************** 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. Changes in version 0.7 ********************** Experimental version released on December 22nd, 2009. * 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. Changes in version 0.6 ********************** Experimental version released on January 18th, 2009. * 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. Changes in version 0.5 ********************** Experimental version released on May 1st, 2008. * 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 in version 0.4 ********************** Experimental version released on February 4th, 2008. * 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. Changes in version 0.3 ********************** Experimental version released on November 11th, 2007. * 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. Changes in version 0.2 ********************** Experimental version released on September 20th, 2007. * 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. Changes in version 0.1 ********************** Experimental version released on August 20th, 2007. * First public version. This was released coinciding with the end of the Google Summer of Code 2007 program. =========================================================================== vim: filetype=text:textwidth=75:expandtab:shiftwidth=2:softtabstop=2