Re: TAP support in automake

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Sat, 31 Mar 2012, Russ Allbery wrote:

> Bob Friesenhahn <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > Ok, now I hear that there are still log files similar to parallel-tests
> > (presumably using the identical facility).  It does not seem that Russ's
> > C TAP Harness offers this quite wonderful feature since the instructions
> > advise to re-run just the one test to see more verbose output (similar
> > to what I have experienced from perl).
>
> Correct; my harness program doesn't currently have a way of storing log
> files.  (Added to TODO.)

Regardless, I will likely use your 'runtests' test driver as a way to 
explore converting some of my test scripts to TAP since Automake 1.12 
is not released yet.  I will start with tests which have little need 
for log files.

> Viewed in that light, TAP doesn't really reduce parallelism.  prove, the
> Perl driver, supports running all the TAP tests in parallel, for example.

Automake already has support for parallelism.  The quality of the 
parallelism depends on how "lumpy" the various TAP tests become.  If 
some are very fast and others take a very long time, then the slowest 
tests will tend to dominate the time.  Listing the slowests tests 
first helps.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/