Re: [GSoC Proposal] automake - Interfacing with a test protocol like TAP or subunit

[Stefano Lattarini]

Hello Robert, and thanks for the feedback.

On Sunday 20 March 2011, Robert Collins wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 1:03 PM, Stefano Lattarini
> <address@hidden> wrote:
> > ABSTRACT:
> >
> >  The Test Anything Protocol (TAP) is a simple text-based protocol
> >  that allows communication between test scripts and a test harness.
> ...
> > Now, in all honesty, I must say that I've chosen TAP not only for its
> > objective qualities and merits, but also because I have some previous
> > knowledge of it (which allowed me to present a more concrete proposal
> > and a meaningful roadmap) and I personally like it (which will probably
> > be a powerful motivator to overcome the unavoidable hurdles I'll
> > encounter down the road).
> >
> > Still, there might be very valid competing alternatives to TAP out there,
> > which I might not know about, but that in the long run would offer
> > Automake more advantages and interoperabilty, thus outweighting the two
> > "personal" advantages of TAP I've reported above.  So, if anyone who's
> > reading this has    proposals about viable alternatives to TAP, please
> > speak up -- your contribution is appreciated!
> 
> TAP is an extremely simple protocol, and the extensions to it to
> support things like not needing to maintain the count of tests,
> additional debug data and so on are pretty rudimentary. subunit, which
> I've mentioned before was written after TAP, to solve similar problems
> and address the issues in TAP itself.
> 
> While the users of a protocol aren't really an indicator of the
> protocols worth, projects as large as samba are using subunit.
> 
> Unlike TAP subunit supports attachments (binary and text) to tests,
> test naming, tagging, timestamping (permitting robust timing data even
> in parallelised or distributed testing).
>
Is there some document that describes the subunit features in depth *and*
with examples?  I mean something similar to what the following is for TAP:
  <http://search.cpan.org/~petdance/Test-Harness/lib/Test/Harness/TAP.pod>
That would be very useful to do a proper comparison, and weight advantages
and disadvatnages.

> Integrating with TAP is basically uninteresting to anyone working in a
> high level language: Python, Ruby,Java, C++ etc.
>
How so? (honest question)

> -Rob
> 

Thanks,
  Stefano