On 7 April 2010 10:28, Thomas Tuegel
Ok, this is the bottom-line that I didn't understand after our first exchange, but I think now I do: I should entirely scrap the second aspect of my proposal and focus exclusively on making Cabal build and run test programs.
Just as a food for thought: how would you deal with test programs that deal with user input? Should "cabal test" only run those that are automatic? The reason I'm asking is that I'm developing a second test executable for graphviz that checks if it can parse "real world" Dot files. Now, I could have it do a search for all .dot and .gv files on the machine in question and try those, except not all of those might be Dot code (just something with the same extension); as such the user has to explicitly pass a list of filenames to the program. This is thus more of a guided test program rather than something that should be run automatically. Also, I'm not sure if this is come up yet in your proposal: what about installation? One thing that Sergei (aka trofi) is trying to add in the Gentoo ebuilds for Haskell packages is something similar to this where tests are optionally built and run; the problem is that if the tests reside in an optional executable then the installation stage will also install these test executables because Cabal has no way of saying "build these but don't install them". This is probably going to be the case for your proposed project as well: should test executables be installed? -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic Ivan.Miljenovic@gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com