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

[Duncan Coutts]

On 28 April 2010 09:24, Richard G. <richardg at richardg.name> wrote:
> I think that formatted plain-text output would be much better than XML,
> something that is human-readable and relatively easy to parse via machine.
>  Something similar to the GHC error output would work well because
> developers are familiar with it.

I have previously advocated a library interface as a detailed
testsuite interface (in addition to a lowest common denominator
interface of stdio+exitcode). That is a test stanza in a package
.cabal file would specify a module containing an entry point of the
right type (like main but using a more interesting type).

That way, cabal or any other tool could run the testsuite and produce
results in whatever format it likes.

As you suggest in your other post, it would make sense to adapt
test-framework to implement the interface specified by Cabal.

Duncan