There's a lot of noise and very little signal about TAP lately. Absolutely no real TAP extensions have been implemented. The TAP document remains in exactly the same form it was 9 months ago. http://search.cpan.org/~petdance/TAP-1.00/TAP.pm
We're spinning our wheels and going nowhere. I'm going to declare the most important TAP tasks and until they're done I really don't want to hear about anything else. If you have a bright TAP idea archive it on the wiki until later. Here they are, in no particular order. *) TAP::Parser / TAP::Harness / Test::Harness 3.0 http://www.hexten.net/mailman/listinfo/tapx-dev We need a flexible TAP parser so folks can do all the things we dream we might be able to do with TAP. TAP::Parser is it. It needs work. There's a mailing list and repo. Andy Armstrong, Ovid and Eric Willhelm are doing all the work so far. Help them. *) Improve the TAP standards document http://search.cpan.org/~petdance/TAP-1.00/TAP.pm Andy Lester wrote a draft of the TAP standard. There have been no releases since. There's mistakes, typos, ommissions, you name it. Work on it. Put it on a POD wiki to allow easier collaborative editing. Talk with Ovid about where the ambiguities are, he's had to work them out for TAP::Parser. *) A TAP version http://perl-qa.yi.org/index.php/TAP_version Before we add any TAP extensions we need a way to identify what version of TAP we're outputting. Discuss and implement. *) TAP diagnostic format http://perl-qa.yi.org/index.php/TAP_diagnostic_syntax There is no way to output diagnostics in TAP. The stuff Test::More spits out to STDERR are unparsable comments indented for humans. Its not TAP. This is the single biggest TAP deficiency. There is a proposal which solves several problems at once. Discuss and implement a patch for Test::Builder to allow authors to output explicit diagnostics.
