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

[Robert Collins]

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).

Integrating with TAP is basically uninteresting to anyone working in a
high level language: Python, Ruby,Java, C++ etc.

-Rob