xref: /netbsd-src/external/bsd/atf/dist/NEWS (revision 7a6a7ae08ac6c612f0fbb0d4425825c6be2a9050)
1Major changes between releases                  Automated Testing Framework
2===========================================================================
3
4
5Changes in version 0.13
6***********************
7
8Experimental version released on March 31st, 2011.
9
10This is the first release after the creation of the Kyua project, a more
11modular and reliable replacement for ATF.  From now on, ATF will change to
12accomodate the transition to this new codebase, but ATF will still continue
13to see development in the short/medium term.  Check out the project page at
14http://code.google.com/p/kyua/ for more details.
15
16The changes in this release are:
17
18* Added support to run the tests with the Kyua runtime engine (kyua-cli), a
19  new package that aims to replace atf-run and atf-report.  The ATF tests
20  can be run with the new system by issuing a 'make installcheck-kyua' from
21  the top-level directory of the project (assuming the 'kyua' binary is
22  available during the configuration stage of ATF).
23
24* atf-run and atf-report are now in maintenance mode (but *not* deprecated
25  yet!).  Kyua already implements a new, much more reliable runtime engine
26  that provides similar features to these tools.  That said, it is not
27  complete yet so all development efforts should go towards it.
28
29* If GDB is installed, atf-run dumps the stack trace of crashing test
30  programs in an attempt to aid debugging.  Contributed by Antti Kantee.
31
32* Reverted default timeout change in previous release and reset its value
33  to 5 minutes.  This was causing several issues, specially when running
34  the existing NetBSD test suite in qemu.
35
36* Fixed the 'match' output checker in atf-check to properly validate the
37  last line of a file even if it does not have a newline.
38
39* Added the ATF_REQUIRE_IN and ATF_REQUIRE_NOT_IN macros to atf-c++ to
40  check for the presence (or lack thereof) of an element in a collection.
41
42* PR bin/44176: Fixed a race condition in atf-run that would crash atf-run
43  when the cleanup of a test case triggered asynchronous modifications to
44  its work directory (e.g. killing a daemon process that cleans up a pid
45  file in the work directory).
46
47* PR bin/44301: Fixed the sample XSLT file to report bogus test programs
48  instead of just listing them as having 0 test cases.
49
50
51Changes in version 0.12
52***********************
53
54Experimental version released on November 7th, 2010.
55
56* Added the ATF_REQUIRE_THROW_RE to atf-c++, which is the same as
57  ATF_REQUIRE_THROW but allows checking for the validity of the exception's
58  error message by means of a regular expression.
59
60* Added the ATF_REQUIRE_MATCH to atf-c++, which allows checking for a
61  regular expression match in a string.
62
63* Changed the default timeout for test cases from 5 minutes to 30 seconds.
64  30 seconds is long enough for virtually all tests to complete, and 5
65  minutes is a way too long pause in a test suite where a single test case
66  stalls.
67
68* Deprecated the use.fs property.  While this seemed like a good idea in
69  the first place to impose more control on what test cases can do, it
70  turns out to be bad.  First, use.fs=false prevents bogus test cases
71  from dumping core so after-the-fact debugging is harder.  Second,
72  supporting use.fs adds a lot of unnecessary complexity.  atf-run will
73  now ignore any value provided to use.fs and will allow test cases to
74  freely access the file system if they wish to.
75
76* Added the atf_tc_get_config_var_as_{bool,long}{,_wd} functions to the atf-c
77  library.  The 'text' module became private in 0.11 but was being used
78  externally to simplify the parsing of configuration variables.
79
80* Made atf-run recognize the 'unprivileged-user' configuration variable
81  and automatically drop root privileges when a test case sets
82  require.user=unprivileged.  Note that this is, by no means, done for
83  security purposes; this is just for user convenience; tests should, in
84  general, not be blindly run as root in the first place.
85
86
87Changes in version 0.11
88***********************
89
90Experimental version released on October 20th, 2010.
91
92* The ATF_CHECK* macros in atf-c++ were renamed to ATF_REQUIRE* to match
93  their counterparts in atf-c.
94
95* Clearly separated the modules in atf-c that are supposed to be public
96  from those that are implementation details.  The header files for the
97  internal modules are not installed any more.
98
99* Made the atf-check tool private.  It is only required by atf-sh and being
100  public has the danger of causing confusion.  Also, making it private
101  simplifies the public API of atf.
102
103* Changed atf-sh to enable per-command error checking (set -e) by default.
104  This catches many cases in which a test case is broken but it is not
105  reported as such because execution continues.
106
107* Fixed the XSTL and CSS stylesheets to support expected failures.
108
109
110Changes in version 0.10
111***********************
112
113Experimental version released on July 2nd, 2010.
114
115Miscellaneous features
116
117* Added expected failures support to test cases and atf-run.  These
118  include, for example, expected clean exits, expected reception of fatal
119  signals, expected timeouts and expected errors in condition checks.
120  These statuses can be used to denote test cases that are known to fail
121  due to a bug in the code they are testing.  atf-report reports these
122  tests separately but they do not count towards the failed test cases
123  amount.
124
125* Added the ATF_CHECK_ERRNO and ATF_REQUIRE_ERRNO to the C library to
126  allow easy checking of call failures that update errno.
127
128* Added the has.cleanup meta-data property to test caes that specifies
129  whether the test case has a cleanup routine or not; its value is
130  automatically set.  This property is read by atf-run to know if it has to
131  run the cleanup routine; skipping this run for every test case
132  significantly speeds up the run time of test suites.
133
134* Reversed the order of the ATF_CHECK_THROW macro in the C++ binding to
135  take the expected exception as the first argument and the statement to
136  execute as the second argument.
137
138Changes in atf-check
139
140* Changed atf-check to support negating the status and output checks by
141  prefixing them with not- and added support to specify multiple checkers
142  for stdout and stderr, not only one.
143
144* Added the match output checker to atf-check to look for regular
145  expressions in the stdout and stderr of commands.
146
147* Modified the exit checks in atf-check to support checking for the
148  reception of signals.
149
150Code simplifications and cleanups
151
152* Removed usage messages from test programs to simplify the
153  implementation of every binding by a significant amount.  They just now
154  refer the user to the appropriate manual page and do not attempt to wrap
155  lines on terminal boundaries.  Test programs are not supposed to be run
156  by users directly so this minor interface regression is not important.
157
158* Removed the atf-format internal utility, which is unused after the
159  change documented above.
160
161* Removed the atf-cleanup internal utility.  It has been unused since the
162  test case isolation was moved to atf-run in 0.8
163
164* Splitted the Makefile.am into smaller files for easier maintenance and
165  dropped the use of M4.  Only affects users building from the repository
166  sources.
167
168* Intermixed tests with the source files in the source tree to provide
169  them more visibility and easier access.  The tests directory is gone from
170  the source tree and tests are now suffixed by _test, not prefixed by t_.
171
172* Simplifications to the atf-c library: removed the io, tcr and ui
173  modules as they had become unnecessary after all simplifications
174  introduced since the 0.8 release.
175
176* Removed the application/X-atf-tcr format introduced in 0.8 release.
177  Tests now print a much simplified format that is easy to parse and nicer
178  to read by end users.  As a side effect, the default for test cases is
179  now to print their results to stdout unless otherwise stated by providing
180  the -r flag.
181
182* Removed XML distribution documents and replaced them with plain-text
183  documents.  They provided little value and introduced a lot of complexity
184  to the build system.
185
186* Simplified the output of atf-version by not attempting to print a
187  revision number when building form a distfile.  Makes the build system
188  easier to maintain.
189
190
191Changes in version 0.9
192**********************
193
194Experimental version released on June 3rd, 2010.
195
196* Added atf-sh, an interpreter to process test programs written using
197  the shell API.  This is not really a shell interpreter by itself though:
198  it is just a wrapper around the system shell that eases the loading of
199  the necessary ATF libraries.
200
201* Removed atf-compile in favour of atf-sh.
202
203* Added the use.fs metadata property to test case, which is used to
204  specify which test cases require file system access.  This is to
205  highlight dependencies on external resources more clearly and to speed up
206  the execution of test suites by skipping the creation of many unnecessary
207  work directories.
208
209* Fixed test programs to get a sane default value for their source
210  directory.  This means that it should not be necessary any more to pass
211  -s when running test programs that do not live in the current directory.
212
213* Defining test case headers became optional.  This is trivial to achieve
214  in shell-based tests but a bit ugly in C and C++.  In C, use the new
215  ATF_TC_WITHOUT_HEAD macro to define the test case, and in C++ use
216  ATF_TEST_CASE_WITHOUT_HEAD.
217
218
219Changes in version 0.8
220**********************
221
222Experimental version released on May 7th, 2010.
223
224* Test programs no longer run several test cases in a row.  The execution
225  of a test program now requires a test case name, and that single test
226  case is executed.  To execute several test cases, use the atf-run utility
227  as usual.
228
229* Test programs no longer fork a subprocess to isolate the execution of
230  test cases.  They run the test case code in-process, and a crash of the
231  test case will result in a crash of the test program.  This is to ease
232  debugging of faulty test cases.
233
234* Test programs no longer isolate their test cases.  This means that they
235  will not create temporary directories nor sanitize the environment any
236  more.  Yes: running a test case that depends on system state by hand will
237  most likely yield different results depending on where (machine,
238  directory, user environment, etc.) it is run.  Isolation has been moved
239  to atf-run.
240
241* Test programs no longer print a cryptic format (application/X-atf-tcs)
242  on a special file channel.  They can now print whatever they want on the
243  screen.  Because test programs can now only run one test case every time,
244  providing controlled output is not necessary any more.
245
246* Test programs no longer write their status into a special file
247  descriptor.  Instead, they create a file with the results, which is later
248  parsed by atf-run.  This changes the semantics of the -r flag.
249
250* atf-run has been adjusted to perform the test case isolation.  As a
251  result, there is now a single canonical place that implements the
252  isolation of test caes.  In previous releases, the three language
253  bindings (C, C++ and shell) had to be kept in sync with each other (read:
254  not a nice thing to do at all).  As a side effect of this change, writing
255  bindings for other languages will be much, much easier from now on.
256
257* atf-run forks test programs on a test case basis, instead of on a test
258  program basis as it did before.  This is to provide the test case
259  isolation that was before implemented by the test programs themselves.
260
261* Removed the atf-exec tool.  This was used to implement test case
262  isolation in atf-sh, but it is now unnecessary.
263
264* It is now optional to define the descr meta-data property.  It has been
265  proven to be mostly useless, because test cases often carry a descriptive
266  name of their own.
267
268
269Changes in version 0.7
270**********************
271
272Experimental version released on December 22nd, 2009.
273
274* Added build-time checks to atf-c and atf-c++.  A binding for atf-sh
275  will come later.
276
277* Migrated all build-time checks for header files to proper ATF tests.
278  This demonstrates the use of the new feature described above.
279
280* Added an internal API for child process management.
281
282* Converted all plain-text distribution documents to a Docbook canonical
283  version, and include pre-generated plain text and HTML copies in the
284  distribution file.
285
286* Simplified the contents of the Makefile.am by regenerating it from a
287  canonical Makefile.am.m4 source.  As a side-effect, some dependency
288  specifications were fixed.
289
290* Migrated all checks from the check target to installcheck, as these
291  require ATF to be installed.
292
293* Fixed sign comparison mismatches triggered by the now-enabled
294  -Wsign-compare.
295
296* Fixed many memory and object leaks.
297
298
299Changes in version 0.6
300**********************
301
302Experimental version released on January 18th, 2009.
303
304* Make atf-exec be able to kill its child process after a certain period
305  of time; this is controlled through the new -t option.
306
307* Change atf-sh to use atf-exec's -t option to control the test case's
308  timeouts, instead of doing it internally.  Same behavior as before, but
309  noticeably faster.
310
311* atf-exec's -g option and atf-killpg are gone due to the previous
312  change.
313
314* Added the atf-check(1) tool, a program that executes a given command
315  and checks its exit code against a known value and allows the management
316  of stdout and stderr in multiple ways.  This replaces the previous
317  atf_check function in the atf-sh library and exposes this functionality
318  to both atf-c and atf-c++.
319
320* Added the ATF_REQUIRE family of macros to the C interface.  These help
321  in checking for fatal test conditions.  The old ATF_CHECK macros now
322  perform non-fatal checks only.  I.e. by using ATF_CHECK, the test case
323  can now continue its execution and the failures will not be reported
324  until the end of the whole run.
325
326* Extended the amount of ATF_CHECK_* C macros with new ones to provide
327  more features to the developer.  These also have their corresponding
328  counterparts in the ATF_REQUIRE_* family.  The new macros (listing the
329  suffixes only) are: _EQ (replaces _EQUAL), _EQ_MSG, _STREQ and
330  _STREQ_MSG.
331
332
333Changes in version 0.5
334**********************
335
336Experimental version released on May 1st, 2008.
337
338* Clauses 3 and 4 of the BSD license used by the project were dropped.
339  All the code is now under a 2-clause BSD license compatible with the GNU
340  General Public License (GPL).
341
342* Added a C-only binding so that binary test programs do not need to be
343  tied to C++ at all.  This binding is now known as the atf-c library.
344
345* Renamed the C++ binding to atf-c++ for consistency with the new atf-c.
346
347* Renamed the POSIX shell binding to atf-sh for consistency with the new
348  atf-c and atf-c++.
349
350* Added a -w flag to test programs through which it is possible to
351  specify the work directory to be used.  This was possible in prior
352  releases by defining the workdir configuration variable (-v workdir=...),
353  but was a conceptually incorrect mechanism.
354
355* Test programs now preserve the execution order of test cases when they
356  are given in the command line.  Even those mentioned more than once are
357  executed multiple times to comply with the user's requests.
358
359
360Changes in version 0.4
361**********************
362
363Experimental version released on February 4th, 2008.
364
365* Added two new manual pages, atf-c++-api and atf-sh-api, describing the
366  C++ and POSIX shell interfaces used to write test programs.
367
368* Added a pkg-config file, useful to get the flags to build against the
369  C++ library or to easily detect the presence of ATF.
370
371* Added a way for test cases to require a specific architecture and/or
372  machine type through the new 'require.arch' and 'require.machine'
373  meta-data properties, respectively.
374
375* Added the 'timeout' property to test cases, useful to set an
376  upper-bound limit for the test's run time and thus prevent global test
377  program stalls due to the test case's misbehavior.
378
379* Added the atf-exec(1) internal utility, used to execute a command
380  after changing the process group it belongs to.
381
382* Added the atf-killpg(1) internal utility, used to kill process groups.
383
384* Multiple portability fixes.  Of special interest, full support for
385  SunOS (Solaris Express Developer Edition 2007/09) using the Sun Studio 12
386  C++ compiler.
387
388* Fixed a serious bug that prevented atf-run(1) from working at all
389  under Fedora 8 x86_64.  Due to the nature of the bug, other platforms
390  were likely affected too.
391
392
393Changes in version 0.3
394**********************
395
396Experimental version released on November 11th, 2007.
397
398* Added XML output support to atf-report.  This is accompanied by a DTD
399  for the format's structure and sample XSLT/CSS files to post-process this
400  output and convert it to a plain HTML report.
401
402* Changed atf-run to add system information to the report it generates.
403  This is currently used by atf-report's XML output only, and is later
404  printed in the HTML reports in a nice and useful summary table.  The user
405  and system administrator are allowed to tune this feature by means of
406  hooks.
407
408* Removed the test cases' 'isolated' property.  This was intended to
409  avoid touching the file system at all when running the related test case,
410  but this has not been true for a long while: some control files are
411  unconditionally required for several purposes, and we cannot easily get
412  rid of them.  This way we remove several critical and delicate pieces of
413  code.
414
415* Improved atf-report's CSV output format to include information about
416  test programs too.
417
418* Fixed the tests that used atf-compile to not require this tool as a
419  helper.  Avoids systems without build-time utilities to skip many tests
420  that could otherwise be run.  (E.g. NetBSD without the comp.tgz set
421  installed.)
422
423* Many general cleanups: Fixed many pieces of code marked as ugly and/or
424  incomplete.
425
426
427Changes in version 0.2
428**********************
429
430Experimental version released on September 20th, 2007.
431
432* Test cases now get a known umask on entry.
433
434* atf-run now detects many unexpected failures caused by test programs and
435  reports them as bogus tests.  atf-report is able to handle these new
436  errors and nicely reports them to the user.
437
438* All the data formats read and written by the tools have been
439  documented and cleaned up.  These include those grammars that define how
440  the different components communicate with each other as well as the
441  format of files written by the developers and users: the Atffiles and the
442  configuration files.
443
444* Added the atf-version tool, a utility that displays information about
445  the currently installed version of ATF.
446
447* Test cases can now define an optional cleanup routine to undo their
448  actions regardless of their exit status.
449
450* atf-report now summarizes the list of failed (bogus) test programs
451  when using the ticker output format.
452
453* Test programs now capture some termination signals and clean up any
454  temporary files before exiting the program.
455
456* Multiple bug fixes and improvements all around.
457
458
459Changes in version 0.1
460**********************
461
462Experimental version released on August 20th, 2007.
463
464* First public version.  This was released coinciding with the end of the
465  Google Summer of Code 2007 program.
466
467
468===========================================================================
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