hi all :) there's a feature split I'm itching for in Test::Builder, etc - the ability to call is() and have it emit TAP free from the confines of plan(). not that I don't want to call plan() (or no_plan) but I want to do that in a completely separate perl interpreter. for example, I want to do something that looks a bit like this
use Test::More tests => 1; print qx!perl t/response.pl!; where response.pl makes a series of calls to is(), ok(), whatever. while this may seem odd it's actually not - I'd like to be able to plan() tests within a client *.t script but have the responses come from one (or more) requests to any kind of server (httpd, smtp, whatever). currently in httpd land we can do this by calling plan() and is() from within a single server-side perl script, but the limitation there is that you can only do that once - if I want to test, say, keepalives I can't have a single test script make multiple requests each with their own plan() calls without things getting tripped up. so, I guess my question is whether the plan->is linkage can be broken in Test::Builder/Test::Harness/wherever and still keep the bookkeeping in tact so that the library behaves the same way for the bulk case. or maybe at least provide some option where calls to is() don't bork out because there's no plan (and providing an option to Test::More where it doesn't send a plan header). so, thoughts or ideas? am I making any sense? --Geoff