Re: TAP support documentation

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Wed, 14 Nov 2012, Alexis Praga wrote:

> Reading about TAP support in the manual, I decided to try this feature.
> Unfortunately, it does not work for versions prior to 1.12.
> Could you make it more obvious in the manual ? It seems to assume you run
> the latests, which is not always the case.

Manuals always refer to the current software and are bundled with the 
software so they are correct for that software version.  Manuals on 
the web are put there as a service but may not apply to older 
versions.

> Also, I would still like to have this feature. Hereis is how I rapidly
> implemented it in the top Makefile.am :
>
> TAP_LOG_DRIVER = env AM_TAP_AWK='$(AWK)' $(SHELL) \
>                  $(top_srcdir)/build-aux/tap-driver.sh
> TESTS = foo.test
>
> check:
>        @for i in $(TESTS); do \
>          $(TAP_LOG_DRIVER) --test-name "$$i" \
>             --log-file $$i.log --trs-file $$i.trs -- $$i;\
>        done
>
>
> Do you think this hack can be used without too much surprise ? Otherwise,
> what do you recommand (upgrading is not an option) ?

Does it work?  Did you verify with 'make distcheck'?  Why are you not 
able to update to Automake 1.12?

For the latest GraphicsMagick release, the tests were converted to use 
TAP as provided with Automake 1.12.  TAP seemed to work fine (it was a 
definite improvement over original Automake tests) but it was 
necessary to add an additional common framework to make TAP tests easy 
to implement.  The common framework used by Automake itself could not 
be directly borrowed since it is GPLed and not easily redistributable 
in packages which are not GPLed.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/