[Haskell-cafe] Re: GSoC: Improving Cabal's Test Support

[Thomas Tuegel]

On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 7:03 PM, Gregory Crosswhite
<gcross at phys.washington.edu> wrote:
> Rather that starting from scratch, you should strongly consider adapting something like test-framework to this task, as it already has done the heavy work of creating a way to combine tests from different frameworks into a single suite and includes such features as displaying a progress bar during the QuickCheck tests.  Furthermore, it is easily extendable to support new kinds of tests;  for example, I found that it was relatively straightforward to add a new kind of "statistical" test to make sure that the average value of a function where where it should be.
>

Thanks for the suggestion!  I've taken a hard look at test-framework
in particular already.  I like it, but the reason I haven't already
chosen to go with that is that it does a lot _more_ than I'm trying to
do here.  The way my proposal stands, whatever framework I go with
gets integrated with Cabal at least to the degree that Cabal can read
test results.  Rogan suggested that test-framework will shortly
support JUnit XML as an output format, so with the rest of my proposal
we'd be talking about adding an XML parsing library to Cabal's
dependencies.

Now, if you're telling me I'm going off in the wrong direction by
proposing to integrate a test framework into Cabal itself, that's
another story.  Should I pare down my proposal to only include support
for a proper 'Test' stanza in the package description file and leave
it at that?

Thanks!
-- 
Thomas Tuegel