xref: /netbsd/external/bsd/atf/dist/NEWS (revision 6550d01e)
1Major changes between releases                  Automated Testing Framework
2===========================================================================
3
4
5Changes in version 0.12
6***********************
7
8Experimental version released on November 7th, 2010.
9
10* Added the ATF_REQUIRE_THROW_RE to atf-c++, which is the same as
11  ATF_REQUIRE_THROW but allows checking for the validity of the exception's
12  error message by means of a regular expression.
13
14* Added the ATF_REQUIRE_MATCH to atf-c++, which allows checking for a
15  regular expression match in a string.
16
17* Changed the default timeout for test cases from 5 minutes to 30 seconds.
18  30 seconds is long enough for virtually all tests to complete, and 5
19  minutes is a way too long pause in a test suite where a single test case
20  stalls.
21
22* Deprecated the use.fs property.  While this seemed like a good idea in
23  the first place to impose more control on what test cases can do, it
24  turns out to be bad.  First, use.fs=false prevents bogus test cases
25  from dumping core so after-the-fact debugging is harder.  Second,
26  supporting use.fs adds a lot of unnecessary complexity.  atf-run will
27  now ignore any value provided to use.fs and will allow test cases to
28  freely access the file system if they wish to.
29
30* Added the atf_tc_get_config_var_as_{bool,long}{,_wd} functions to the atf-c
31  library.  The 'text' module became private in 0.11 but was being used
32  externally to simplify the parsing of configuration variables.
33
34* Made atf-run recognize the 'unprivileged-user' configuration variable
35  and automatically drop root privileges when a test case sets
36  require.user=unprivileged.  Note that this is, by no means, done for
37  security purposes; this is just for user convenience; tests should, in
38  general, not be blindly run as root in the first place.
39
40
41Changes in version 0.11
42***********************
43
44Experimental version released on October 20th, 2010.
45
46* The ATF_CHECK* macros in atf-c++ were renamed to ATF_REQUIRE* to match
47  their counterparts in atf-c.
48
49* Clearly separated the modules in atf-c that are supposed to be public
50  from those that are implementation details.  The header files for the
51  internal modules are not installed any more.
52
53* Made the atf-check tool private.  It is only required by atf-sh and being
54  public has the danger of causing confusion.  Also, making it private
55  simplifies the public API of atf.
56
57* Changed atf-sh to enable per-command error checking (set -e) by default.
58  This catches many cases in which a test case is broken but it is not
59  reported as such because execution continues.
60
61* Fixed the XSTL and CSS stylesheets to support expected failures.
62
63
64Changes in version 0.10
65***********************
66
67Experimental version released on July 2nd, 2010.
68
69Miscellaneous features
70
71* Added expected failures support to test cases and atf-run.  These
72  include, for example, expected clean exits, expected reception of fatal
73  signals, expected timeouts and expected errors in condition checks.
74  These statuses can be used to denote test cases that are known to fail
75  due to a bug in the code they are testing.  atf-report reports these
76  tests separately but they do not count towards the failed test cases
77  amount.
78
79* Added the ATF_CHECK_ERRNO and ATF_REQUIRE_ERRNO to the C library to
80  allow easy checking of call failures that update errno.
81
82* Added the has.cleanup meta-data property to test caes that specifies
83  whether the test case has a cleanup routine or not; its value is
84  automatically set.  This property is read by atf-run to know if it has to
85  run the cleanup routine; skipping this run for every test case
86  significantly speeds up the run time of test suites.
87
88* Reversed the order of the ATF_CHECK_THROW macro in the C++ binding to
89  take the expected exception as the first argument and the statement to
90  execute as the second argument.
91
92Changes in atf-check
93
94* Changed atf-check to support negating the status and output checks by
95  prefixing them with not- and added support to specify multiple checkers
96  for stdout and stderr, not only one.
97
98* Added the match output checker to atf-check to look for regular
99  expressions in the stdout and stderr of commands.
100
101* Modified the exit checks in atf-check to support checking for the
102  reception of signals.
103
104Code simplifications and cleanups
105
106* Removed usage messages from test programs to simplify the
107  implementation of every binding by a significant amount.  They just now
108  refer the user to the appropriate manual page and do not attempt to wrap
109  lines on terminal boundaries.  Test programs are not supposed to be run
110  by users directly so this minor interface regression is not important.
111
112* Removed the atf-format internal utility, which is unused after the
113  change documented above.
114
115* Removed the atf-cleanup internal utility.  It has been unused since the
116  test case isolation was moved to atf-run in 0.8
117
118* Splitted the Makefile.am into smaller files for easier maintenance and
119  dropped the use of M4.  Only affects users building from the repository
120  sources.
121
122* Intermixed tests with the source files in the source tree to provide
123  them more visibility and easier access.  The tests directory is gone from
124  the source tree and tests are now suffixed by _test, not prefixed by t_.
125
126* Simplifications to the atf-c library: removed the io, tcr and ui
127  modules as they had become unnecessary after all simplifications
128  introduced since the 0.8 release.
129
130* Removed the application/X-atf-tcr format introduced in 0.8 release.
131  Tests now print a much simplified format that is easy to parse and nicer
132  to read by end users.  As a side effect, the default for test cases is
133  now to print their results to stdout unless otherwise stated by providing
134  the -r flag.
135
136* Removed XML distribution documents and replaced them with plain-text
137  documents.  They provided little value and introduced a lot of complexity
138  to the build system.
139
140* Simplified the output of atf-version by not attempting to print a
141  revision number when building form a distfile.  Makes the build system
142  easier to maintain.
143
144
145Changes in version 0.9
146**********************
147
148Experimental version released on June 3rd, 2010.
149
150* Added atf-sh, an interpreter to process test programs written using
151  the shell API.  This is not really a shell interpreter by itself though:
152  it is just a wrapper around the system shell that eases the loading of
153  the necessary ATF libraries.
154
155* Removed atf-compile in favour of atf-sh.
156
157* Added the use.fs metadata property to test case, which is used to
158  specify which test cases require file system access.  This is to
159  highlight dependencies on external resources more clearly and to speed up
160  the execution of test suites by skipping the creation of many unnecessary
161  work directories.
162
163* Fixed test programs to get a sane default value for their source
164  directory.  This means that it should not be necessary any more to pass
165  -s when running test programs that do not live in the current directory.
166
167* Defining test case headers became optional.  This is trivial to achieve
168  in shell-based tests but a bit ugly in C and C++.  In C, use the new
169  ATF_TC_WITHOUT_HEAD macro to define the test case, and in C++ use
170  ATF_TEST_CASE_WITHOUT_HEAD.
171
172
173Changes in version 0.8
174**********************
175
176Experimental version released on May 7th, 2010.
177
178* Test programs no longer run several test cases in a row.  The execution
179  of a test program now requires a test case name, and that single test
180  case is executed.  To execute several test cases, use the atf-run utility
181  as usual.
182
183* Test programs no longer fork a subprocess to isolate the execution of
184  test cases.  They run the test case code in-process, and a crash of the
185  test case will result in a crash of the test program.  This is to ease
186  debugging of faulty test cases.
187
188* Test programs no longer isolate their test cases.  This means that they
189  will not create temporary directories nor sanitize the environment any
190  more.  Yes: running a test case that depends on system state by hand will
191  most likely yield different results depending on where (machine,
192  directory, user environment, etc.) it is run.  Isolation has been moved
193  to atf-run.
194
195* Test programs no longer print a cryptic format (application/X-atf-tcs)
196  on a special file channel.  They can now print whatever they want on the
197  screen.  Because test programs can now only run one test case every time,
198  providing controlled output is not necessary any more.
199
200* Test programs no longer write their status into a special file
201  descriptor.  Instead, they create a file with the results, which is later
202  parsed by atf-run.  This changes the semantics of the -r flag.
203
204* atf-run has been adjusted to perform the test case isolation.  As a
205  result, there is now a single canonical place that implements the
206  isolation of test caes.  In previous releases, the three language
207  bindings (C, C++ and shell) had to be kept in sync with each other (read:
208  not a nice thing to do at all).  As a side effect of this change, writing
209  bindings for other languages will be much, much easier from now on.
210
211* atf-run forks test programs on a test case basis, instead of on a test
212  program basis as it did before.  This is to provide the test case
213  isolation that was before implemented by the test programs themselves.
214
215* Removed the atf-exec tool.  This was used to implement test case
216  isolation in atf-sh, but it is now unnecessary.
217
218* It is now optional to define the descr meta-data property.  It has been
219  proven to be mostly useless, because test cases often carry a descriptive
220  name of their own.
221
222
223Changes in version 0.7
224**********************
225
226Experimental version released on December 22nd, 2009.
227
228* Added build-time checks to atf-c and atf-c++.  A binding for atf-sh
229  will come later.
230
231* Migrated all build-time checks for header files to proper ATF tests.
232  This demonstrates the use of the new feature described above.
233
234* Added an internal API for child process management.
235
236* Converted all plain-text distribution documents to a Docbook canonical
237  version, and include pre-generated plain text and HTML copies in the
238  distribution file.
239
240* Simplified the contents of the Makefile.am by regenerating it from a
241  canonical Makefile.am.m4 source.  As a side-effect, some dependency
242  specifications were fixed.
243
244* Migrated all checks from the check target to installcheck, as these
245  require ATF to be installed.
246
247* Fixed sign comparison mismatches triggered by the now-enabled
248  -Wsign-compare.
249
250* Fixed many memory and object leaks.
251
252
253Changes in version 0.6
254**********************
255
256Experimental version released on January 18th, 2009.
257
258* Make atf-exec be able to kill its child process after a certain period
259  of time; this is controlled through the new -t option.
260
261* Change atf-sh to use atf-exec's -t option to control the test case's
262  timeouts, instead of doing it internally.  Same behavior as before, but
263  noticeably faster.
264
265* atf-exec's -g option and atf-killpg are gone due to the previous
266  change.
267
268* Added the atf-check(1) tool, a program that executes a given command
269  and checks its exit code against a known value and allows the management
270  of stdout and stderr in multiple ways.  This replaces the previous
271  atf_check function in the atf-sh library and exposes this functionality
272  to both atf-c and atf-c++.
273
274* Added the ATF_REQUIRE family of macros to the C interface.  These help
275  in checking for fatal test conditions.  The old ATF_CHECK macros now
276  perform non-fatal checks only.  I.e. by using ATF_CHECK, the test case
277  can now continue its execution and the failures will not be reported
278  until the end of the whole run.
279
280* Extended the amount of ATF_CHECK_* C macros with new ones to provide
281  more features to the developer.  These also have their corresponding
282  counterparts in the ATF_REQUIRE_* family.  The new macros (listing the
283  suffixes only) are: _EQ (replaces _EQUAL), _EQ_MSG, _STREQ and
284  _STREQ_MSG.
285
286
287Changes in version 0.5
288**********************
289
290Experimental version released on May 1st, 2008.
291
292* Clauses 3 and 4 of the BSD license used by the project were dropped.
293  All the code is now under a 2-clause BSD license compatible with the GNU
294  General Public License (GPL).
295
296* Added a C-only binding so that binary test programs do not need to be
297  tied to C++ at all.  This binding is now known as the atf-c library.
298
299* Renamed the C++ binding to atf-c++ for consistency with the new atf-c.
300
301* Renamed the POSIX shell binding to atf-sh for consistency with the new
302  atf-c and atf-c++.
303
304* Added a -w flag to test programs through which it is possible to
305  specify the work directory to be used.  This was possible in prior
306  releases by defining the workdir configuration variable (-v workdir=...),
307  but was a conceptually incorrect mechanism.
308
309* Test programs now preserve the execution order of test cases when they
310  are given in the command line.  Even those mentioned more than once are
311  executed multiple times to comply with the user's requests.
312
313
314Changes in version 0.4
315**********************
316
317Experimental version released on February 4th, 2008.
318
319* Added two new manual pages, atf-c++-api and atf-sh-api, describing the
320  C++ and POSIX shell interfaces used to write test programs.
321
322* Added a pkg-config file, useful to get the flags to build against the
323  C++ library or to easily detect the presence of ATF.
324
325* Added a way for test cases to require a specific architecture and/or
326  machine type through the new 'require.arch' and 'require.machine'
327  meta-data properties, respectively.
328
329* Added the 'timeout' property to test cases, useful to set an
330  upper-bound limit for the test's run time and thus prevent global test
331  program stalls due to the test case's misbehavior.
332
333* Added the atf-exec(1) internal utility, used to execute a command
334  after changing the process group it belongs to.
335
336* Added the atf-killpg(1) internal utility, used to kill process groups.
337
338* Multiple portability fixes.  Of special interest, full support for
339  SunOS (Solaris Express Developer Edition 2007/09) using the Sun Studio 12
340  C++ compiler.
341
342* Fixed a serious bug that prevented atf-run(1) from working at all
343  under Fedora 8 x86_64.  Due to the nature of the bug, other platforms
344  were likely affected too.
345
346
347Changes in version 0.3
348**********************
349
350Experimental version released on November 11th, 2007.
351
352* Added XML output support to atf-report.  This is accompanied by a DTD
353  for the format's structure and sample XSLT/CSS files to post-process this
354  output and convert it to a plain HTML report.
355
356* Changed atf-run to add system information to the report it generates.
357  This is currently used by atf-report's XML output only, and is later
358  printed in the HTML reports in a nice and useful summary table.  The user
359  and system administrator are allowed to tune this feature by means of
360  hooks.
361
362* Removed the test cases' 'isolated' property.  This was intended to
363  avoid touching the file system at all when running the related test case,
364  but this has not been true for a long while: some control files are
365  unconditionally required for several purposes, and we cannot easily get
366  rid of them.  This way we remove several critical and delicate pieces of
367  code.
368
369* Improved atf-report's CSV output format to include information about
370  test programs too.
371
372* Fixed the tests that used atf-compile to not require this tool as a
373  helper.  Avoids systems without build-time utilities to skip many tests
374  that could otherwise be run.  (E.g. NetBSD without the comp.tgz set
375  installed.)
376
377* Many general cleanups: Fixed many pieces of code marked as ugly and/or
378  incomplete.
379
380
381Changes in version 0.2
382**********************
383
384Experimental version released on September 20th, 2007.
385
386* Test cases now get a known umask on entry.
387
388* atf-run now detects many unexpected failures caused by test programs and
389  reports them as bogus tests.  atf-report is able to handle these new
390  errors and nicely reports them to the user.
391
392* All the data formats read and written by the tools have been
393  documented and cleaned up.  These include those grammars that define how
394  the different components communicate with each other as well as the
395  format of files written by the developers and users: the Atffiles and the
396  configuration files.
397
398* Added the atf-version tool, a utility that displays information about
399  the currently installed version of ATF.
400
401* Test cases can now define an optional cleanup routine to undo their
402  actions regardless of their exit status.
403
404* atf-report now summarizes the list of failed (bogus) test programs
405  when using the ticker output format.
406
407* Test programs now capture some termination signals and clean up any
408  temporary files before exiting the program.
409
410* Multiple bug fixes and improvements all around.
411
412
413Changes in version 0.1
414**********************
415
416Experimental version released on August 20th, 2007.
417
418* First public version.  This was released coinciding with the end of the
419  Google Summer of Code 2007 program.
420
421
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