On Wed, 2010-04-28 at 10:42 -0400, Thomas Tuegel wrote: > On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 4:54 AM, Duncan Coutts > <duncan.cou...@googlemail.com> wrote: > > On 28 April 2010 09:24, Richard G. <richa...@richardg.name> wrote: > >> I think that formatted plain-text output would be much better than XML, > >> something that is human-readable and relatively easy to parse via machine. > >> Something similar to the GHC error output would work well because > >> developers are familiar with it. > > > > I have previously advocated a library interface as a detailed > > testsuite interface (in addition to a lowest common denominator > > interface of stdio+exitcode). That is a test stanza in a package > > .cabal file would specify a module containing an entry point of the > > right type (like main but using a more interesting type). > > > > That way, cabal or any other tool could run the testsuite and produce > > results in whatever format it likes. > > I appreciate the elegance of this method, but it seems to me that it > requires dynamic loading, which is currently in a sorry state.
Actually it doesn't require dynamic loading. It just requires compiling a stub program that imports the user's library and some test-runner code. Cabal is good at doing that kind of thing already (eg Setup.hs scripts). > One way or another, cabal will need to provide a data structure it expects > test suites to use for results. Is there a substantial advantage to a > library interface, versus providing Read/Show instances for the test > result data structure? Yes, it means the testing agent (cabal-install or some other program/system) can do more than simply run all the tests. It means it can enumerate them and not run them (think a GUI or web interface), run a subset of tests, run them in parallel etc. Duncan _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
