Hello. You probably know that Transvirtual (Kaffe) has a partial test package, Japhar has a partial test package, Classpath had a partial test package and Cygnus (gjc) had a partial test package. Anthony Green at Cygnus suggested that we all work together on a test package as that is the most pointless thing to duplicate. Paul Fisher and I have been talking with them and it looks like we are going to be able to join forces on what has been called project "Mauve". I think this has obvious benefits. Nobody likes writing test packages and this helps us lessen the pain by spreading it among more people. It also reduces the amount of duplicate effort and allows us to focus on our (pardon the businesspeak) "core competency". There is a web page up at http://sourceware.cygnus.com/mauve/ Information on mailing lists is there too. So feel free to sign up if you are interested. How does this affect us? For Japhar, I can't speak. I don't think anyone from Japhar was contacted about this, but obviously this would be of interest. To the best of my knowledge the Japhar test suite is not actively being developed. Assuming this sort of test package is sufficient for you, it might eliminate the need to develop much of it further. I was planning on taking the Japhar tests that exist and adapting them to Mauve if they look useful. For Classpath, I think it will be great. Right now each of us has to write tests for our classes as we write them. Under a shared test package, we can look and see if someone else already wrote one for us and if they did, we can use that! Even in the worst case scenario we are no worse off than we are today. That is, we have to write the test package ourselves. More details will be forthcoming when they are available. If Classpath people object to this, please say so now. If there are any concerns, please also voice them. Now that Mauve mailing lists are available, all future discussions will probably be totally public. What features this package will have I don't know yet since it doesn't exist, but the plan is to allow us to both run automated regression tests on packages by doing a "make check". (This is already something I could sorely use when applying fixes). It will also check for various compatibility levels with the Java spec. For example, Java 1.1, 1.2, PersonalJava, etc. Let me know what you think. -- Aaron M. Renn ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.urbanophile.com/arenn/
