Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: GSoC: Improving Cabal's Test Support

On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 4:54 AM, Duncan Coutts wrote:

On 28 April 2010 09:24, Richard G. 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. 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?

As you suggest in your other post, it would make sense to adapt test-framework to implement the interface specified by Cabal.

I agree, as well; this is essentially the approach I took in my proposal. -- Thomas Tuegel