Hi all, The AllowFailure annotation is very useful in that it allows specific test methods to be ignored during a typical Maven build.
The implementation, however is rather confusing as a "clean" build of OpenJPA will typically contain several stack traces from exceptions. Running these optional tests that currently do not pass just consumes CPU cycles that could be better spent elsewhere. I propose refactoring @AllowFailure to be called @OptionalTest (or just @Optional) and updating the supporting methods in PersistenceTestCase so that test methods (or classes) annotated with @OptionalTest are skipped unless a jvm system property is true (ie -Dopenjpa.optional.tests=true). I think this will save everyone's CPU cycles without violating the intent of @AllowFailure. In addition with this change we could resurrect the changes for OPENJPA-770 and we could clean up the root pom.xml a bit. Anyone else have strong opinions about @AllowFailure? -mike
