Tests in Cabal

[Duncan Coutts]

On Wed, 2008-01-09 at 10:27 +0000, Adrian Hey wrote:

> Is this really the way tests are supposed to be included?
> 
> It doesn't seem workable to me. I wonder if it would be better to just
> build the lib first (without tests) and then separately build one or
> more test executables?
> 
> What does everyone else do about this?

I've only seen one package that actually uses tests integrated into the
Setup.hs. So it seems everyone just runs tests manually. This is a
fairly large hole in the Cabal story at the moment imho.

Part of the problem is that we don't support custom Setup.hs stuff very
well, we encourage people to use the simple build system. But for tests,
even if it used the simple build system we'd end up making it use the
custom flavour just to run some tests. It's not very satisfactory.

I wonder if we shouldn't move tests into their own file completely. The
problem always with custom Setup.hs scripts is that they're the first
point of entry, and if it does not compile then everything is stuffed
and you don't get a good error message.

Duncan