I did some work on the exec utility recently. One of the enhancements I added was a summary section at the end of the output. It seems that this had the unexpected consequence to the scripts that interpret the output of the utility, namely that the new summary is taken as additional tests, examples, or locales and included in the generated reports.
It's clear that the scripts aren't robust enough to deal with these types of changes. I'd like to find a way to make them more robust so that we can safely enhance the exec utility's output in the future without causing this sort of adverse fallout. To make this possible I think we need to enhance the output of exec to help the scripts disambiguate ordinary output (such as the "PROGRAM SUMMARY" label I added) from the output relevant to the scripts (i.e., the examples, tests, and locales). What should this output format look like? Would adding the number of each program in front its name be sufficient? I.e., replacing NAME STATUS WARN ASSERTS FAILED PERCNT ... sanity_test.sh 0 0 46 0 100% af_ZA.ISO-8859-1.sh 0 0 16 0 100% ar_AE.ISO-8859-6.sh 0 0 16 0 100% ar_BH.ISO-8859-6.sh 0 0 16 0 100% with ## NAME STATUS WARN ASSERTS FAILED PERCNT ... 1. sanity_test.sh 0 0 46 0 100% 2. af_ZA.ISO-8859-1.sh 0 0 16 0 100% 3. ar_AE.ISO-8859-6.sh 0 0 16 0 100% 4. ar_BH.ISO-8859-6.sh 0 0 16 0 100% That way scripts written to process this type of output would look for lines matching the RE pattern "^ *[1-9][0-9]*\. [^ ][^ ]* *" to reliably distinguish find programs (examples, locales, tests) in the log files from other kinds of output. The big assumption here is that there would be no other lines matching that RE in the logs, or at least not in the immediate vicinity of the output from exec. I would also like to make an additional enhancement to help scripts to extract the relevant exec output from the rest of the contents of the log and differentiate between examples, locales, and tests. I'm thinking replacing the label "NAME" with "EXAMPLE NAME", "LOCALE NAME", and "TEST NAME" and ending the output with something like "END EXAMPLES" etc. should do it. Any other/better ideas? Martin
