Hi, I've had the chance to talk to Marc Philipp from the JUnit team again, and I'd like to share with you some of our discussions.
First we talked about the progress with the surefire provider: Currently I've done not much. We have a junit5 branch with a single PR merged (the JUnit5VersionsIT). Further more we have some pending PRs which need to be reviewed/merged. We haven't done any "real" development yet. I told Marc that a problem with implementing the ITs at the moment is, that the JUnit 5.0.0-m2 provider implementation is very limited. So we thought it may be a good thing to depend on the SNAPSHOT of JUnit5 in the junit5 as long as we do not have our own implementation. This may be fragile, but we can pick up the latest changes to the provider implementation. Then we talked about moving the provider code from junit to maven-surefire. This is clearly the preferred way to go for the junit team. From a user perspective it would also be better to not have a junit provider and a maven-surefire provider for junit5. The problem we identified may be when this code could be released at maven-surefire. Currently JUnit 5 GA is expected sometime in early 2017. If the provider code is moved to maven-surefire there should be a release very soon after the JUnit 5 GA release. Otherwise nobody can use JUnit 5 with maven. The alternative would be, that JUnit releases the provider implementation when they go GA and after that the code is moved to surefire. The problem with this approach is, that it may lead to confusion for the users. My personal view is, that it would be good to integrate the provider code into maven-surefire as soon as possible, but I not yet firm enough with the code base the be really productive. I hope to get a better understanding of the codebase during the next few weeks. Regards, Benedikt
