On 11 January 2011 18:09, Thomas Tuegel
One thing to do would be to change the interface so there is only one "Testable" class, allow tests in it to run in IO,
I would be happy with this.
and provide some kind of combinator for denoting safe/unsafe tests.
That might be a possible extension. I am of the opinion that "unsafe" tests (i.e. those which cannot be run in parallel with other tests) are both rare and undesirable from a design perspective, and so we should not provide explicit support for them.
One other thing we've been discussing is what to do about TestOptions. The fallout of this discussion is essentially that everything TestOptions is trying to do, GetOpt does better. ... have a method such as "options :: [OptDescr (t -> t)]" in class Testable. Option 3 is to delegate option parsing to the test provider. I prefer option 2: compared to option 3, it enforces standardization more rigidly and takes some of the work off test provider authors.
Option 2 seems like a reasonable choice. GetOpt isn't perfect (I like cmdargs) but it does have the considerable advantage of being a de-facto standard and is in the base package. I think your idea to use [OptDescr (t -> t)] is particularly elegant! I look forward to seeing your patch :-). Let me (and the list) know if any more issues come up. Cheers, Max