path: root/contrib/atf/NEWS

Major changes between releases                  Automated Testing Framework
===========================================================================


Changes in version 0.16
***********************

Experimental version released on July 10th, 2012.

* Added a --enable-tools flag to configure to request the build of the
  deprecated ATF tools, whose build is now disabled by default.  In order
  to continue running tests, you should migrate to Kyua instead of enabling
  the build of the deprecated tools.  The kyua-atf-compat package provides
  transitional compatibility versions of atf-run and atf-report built on
  top of Kyua.

* Tweaked the ATF_TEST_CASE macro of atf-c++ so that the compiler can
  detect defined but unused test cases.

* PR bin/45859: Fixed some XSLT bugs that resulted in the tc-time and
  tp-time XML tags leaking into the generated HTML file.  Also improved
  the CSS file slightly to correct alignment and color issues with the
  timestamps column.

* Optimized atf-c++/macros.hpp so that GNU G++ consumes less memory during
  compilation with GNU G++.

* Flipped the default to building shared libraries for atf-c and atf-c++,
  and started versioning them.  As a side-effect, this removes the
  --enable-unstable-shared flag from configure that appears to not work any
  more (under NetBSD).  Additionally, some distributions require the use of
  shared libraries for proper dependency tracking (e.g. Fedora), so it is
  better if we do the right versioning upstream.

* Project hosting moved from an adhoc solution (custom web site and
  Monotone repository) to Google Code (standard wiki and Git).  ATF now
  lives in a subcomponent of the Kyua project.


Changes in version 0.15
***********************

Experimental version released on January 16th, 2012.

* Respect stdin in atf-check.  The previous release silenced stdin for any
  processes spawned by atf, not only test programs, which caused breakage
  in tests that pipe data through atf-check.

* Performance improvements to atf-sh.

* Enabled detection of unused parameters and variables in the code and
  fixed all warnings.

* Changed the behavior of "developer mode".  Compiler warnings are now
  enabled unconditionally regardless of whether we are in developer mode or
  not; developer mode is now only used to perform strict warning checks and
  to enable assertions.  Additionally, developer mode is now only
  automatically enabled when building from the repository, not for formal
  releases.

* Added new Autoconf M4 macros (ATF_ARG_WITH, ATF_CHECK_C and
  ATF_CHECK_CXX) to provide a consistent way of defining a --with-arg flag
  in configure scripts and detecting the presence of any of the ATF
  bindings.  Note that ATF_CHECK_SH was already introduced in 0.14, but it
  has now been modified to also honor --with-atf if instantiated.

* Added timing support to atf-run / atf-report.

* Added support for a 'require.memory' property, to specify the minimum
  amount of physical memory needed by the test case to yield valid results.

* PR bin/45690: Force an ISO-8859-1 encoding in the XML files generated by
  atf-report so that invalid data in the output of test cases does not
  mangle our report.


Changes in version 0.14
***********************

Experimental version released on June 14th, 2011.

* Added a pkg-config file for atf-sh and an aclocal file to ease the
  detection of atf-sh from autoconf scripts.

* Made the default test case body defined by atf_sh fail.  This is to
  ensure that test cases are properly defined in test programs and helps
  in catching typos in the names of the body functions.

* PR bin/44882: Made atf-run connect the stdin of test cases to /dev/zero.
  This provides more consistent results with "normal" execution (in
  particular, when tests are executed detached from a terminal).

* Made atf-run hardcode TZ=UTC for test cases.  It used to undefine TZ, but
  that does not take into account that libc determines the current timezone
  from a configuration file.

* All test programs will now print a warning when they are not run through
  atf-run(1) stating that this is unsupported and may deliver incorrect
  results.

* Added support for the 'require.files' test-case property.  This allows
  test cases to specify installed files that must be present for the test
  case to run.


Changes in version 0.13
***********************

Experimental version released on March 31st, 2011.

This is the first release after the creation of the Kyua project, a more
modular and reliable replacement for ATF.  From now on, ATF will change to
accomodate the transition to this new codebase, but ATF will still continue
to see development in the short/medium term.  Check out the project page at
http://code.google.com/p/kyua/ for more details.

The changes in this release are:

* Added support to run the tests with the Kyua runtime engine (kyua-cli), a
  new package that aims to replace atf-run and atf-report.  The ATF tests
  can be run with the new system by issuing a 'make installcheck-kyua' from
  the top-level directory of the project (assuming the 'kyua' binary is
  available during the configuration stage of ATF).

* atf-run and atf-report are now in maintenance mode (but *not* deprecated
  yet!).  Kyua already implements a new, much more reliable runtime engine
  that provides similar features to these tools.  That said, it is not
  complete yet so all development efforts should go towards it.

* If GDB is installed, atf-run dumps the stack trace of crashing test
  programs in an attempt to aid debugging.  Contributed by Antti Kantee.

* Reverted default timeout change in previous release and reset its value
  to 5 minutes.  This was causing several issues, specially when running
  the existing NetBSD test suite in qemu.

* Fixed the 'match' output checker in atf-check to properly validate the
  last line of a file even if it does not have a newline.

* Added the ATF_REQUIRE_IN and ATF_REQUIRE_NOT_IN macros to atf-c++ to
  check for the presence (or lack thereof) of an element in a collection.

* PR bin/44176: Fixed a race condition in atf-run that would crash atf-run
  when the cleanup of a test case triggered asynchronous modifications to
  its work directory (e.g. killing a daemon process that cleans up a pid
  file in the work directory).

* PR bin/44301: Fixed the sample XSLT file to report bogus test programs
  instead of just listing them as having 0 test cases.


Changes in version 0.12
***********************

Experimental version released on November 7th, 2010.

* Added the ATF_REQUIRE_THROW_RE to atf-c++, which is the same as
  ATF_REQUIRE_THROW but allows checking for the validity of the exception's
  error message by means of a regular expression.

* Added the ATF_REQUIRE_MATCH to atf-c++, which allows checking for a
  regular expression match in a string.

* Changed the default timeout for test cases from 5 minutes to 30 seconds.
  30 seconds is long enough for virtually all tests to complete, and 5
  minutes is a way too long pause in a test suite where a single test case
  stalls.

* Deprecated the use.fs property.  While this seemed like a good idea in
  the first place to impose more control on what test cases can do, it
  turns out to be bad.  First, use.fs=false prevents bogus test cases
  from dumping core so after-the-fact debugging is harder.  Second,
  supporting use.fs adds a lot of unnecessary complexity.  atf-run will
  now ignore any value provided to use.fs and will allow test cases to
  freely access the file system if they wish to.

* Added the atf_tc_get_config_var_as_{bool,long}{,_wd} functions to the atf-c
  library.  The 'text' module became private in 0.11 but was being used
  externally to simplify the parsing of configuration variables.

* Made atf-run recognize the 'unprivileged-user' configuration variable
  and automatically drop root privileges when a test case sets
  require.user=unprivileged.  Note that this is, by no means, done for
  security purposes; this is just for user convenience; tests should, in
  general, not be blindly run as root in the first place.


Changes in version 0.11
***********************

Experimental version released on October 20th, 2010.

* The ATF_CHECK* macros in atf-c++ were renamed to ATF_REQUIRE* to match
  their counterparts in atf-c.

* Clearly separated the modules in atf-c that are supposed to be public
  from those that are implementation details.  The header files for the
  internal modules are not installed any more.

* Made the atf-check tool private.  It is only required by atf-sh and being
  public has the danger of causing confusion.  Also, making it private
  simplifies the public API of atf.

* Changed atf-sh to enable per-command error checking (set -e) by default.
  This catches many cases in which a test case is broken but it is not
  reported as such because execution continues.

* Fixed the XSTL and CSS stylesheets to support expected failures.


Changes in version 0.10
***********************

Experimental version released on July 2nd, 2010.

Miscellaneous features

* Added expected failures support to test cases and atf-run.  These
  include, for example, expected clean exits, expected reception of fatal
  signals, expected timeouts and expected errors in condition checks.
  These statuses can be used to denote test cases that are known to fail
  due to a bug in the code they are testing.  atf-report reports these
  tests separately but they do not count towards the failed test cases
  amount.

* Added the ATF_CHECK_ERRNO and ATF_REQUIRE_ERRNO to the C library to
  allow easy checking of call failures that update errno.

* Added the has.cleanup meta-data property to test caes that specifies
  whether the test case has a cleanup routine or not; its value is
  automatically set.  This property is read by atf-run to know if it has to
  run the cleanup routine; skipping this run for every test case
  significantly speeds up the run time of test suites.

* Reversed the order of the ATF_CHECK_THROW macro in the C++ binding to
  take the expected exception as the first argument and the statement to
  execute as the second argument.

Changes in atf-check

* Changed atf-check to support negating the status and output checks by
  prefixing them with not- and added support to specify multiple checkers
  for stdout and stderr, not only one.

* Added the match output checker to atf-check to look for regular
  expressions in the stdout and stderr of commands.

* Modified the exit checks in atf-check to support checking for the
  reception of signals.

Code simplifications and cleanups

* Removed usage messages from test programs to simplify the
  implementation of every binding by a significant amount.  They just now
  refer the user to the appropriate manual page and do not attempt to wrap
  lines on terminal boundaries.  Test programs are not supposed to be run
  by users directly so this minor interface regression is not important.

* Removed the atf-format internal utility, which is unused after the
  change documented above.

* Removed the atf-cleanup internal utility.  It has been unused since the
  test case isolation was moved to atf-run in 0.8

* Splitted the Makefile.am into smaller files for easier maintenance and
  dropped the use of M4.  Only affects users building from the repository
  sources.

* Intermixed tests with the source files in the source tree to provide
  them more visibility and easier access.  The tests directory is gone from
  the source tree and tests are now suffixed by _test, not prefixed by t_.

* Simplifications to the atf-c library: removed the io, tcr and ui
  modules as they had become unnecessary after all simplifications
  introduced since the 0.8 release.

* Removed the application/X-atf-tcr format introduced in 0.8 release.
  Tests now print a much simplified format that is easy to parse and nicer
  to read by end users.  As a side effect, the default for test cases is
  now to print their results to stdout unless otherwise stated by providing
  the -r flag.

* Removed XML distribution documents and replaced them with plain-text
  documents.  They provided little value and introduced a lot of complexity
  to the build system.

* Simplified the output of atf-version by not attempting to print a
  revision number when building form a distfile.  Makes the build system
  easier to maintain.


Changes in version 0.9
**********************

Experimental version released on June 3rd, 2010.

* Added atf-sh, an interpreter to process test programs written using
  the shell API.  This is not really a shell interpreter by itself though:
  it is just a wrapper around the system shell that eases the loading of
  the necessary ATF libraries.

* Removed atf-compile in favour of atf-sh.

* Added the use.fs metadata property to test case, which is used to
  specify which test cases require file system access.  This is to
  highlight dependencies on external resources more clearly and to speed up
  the execution of test suites by skipping the creation of many unnecessary
  work directories.

* Fixed test programs to get a sane default value for their source
  directory.  This means that it should not be necessary any more to pass
  -s when running test programs that do not live in the current directory.

* Defining test case headers became optional.  This is trivial to achieve
  in shell-based tests but a bit ugly in C and C++.  In C, use the new
  ATF_TC_WITHOUT_HEAD macro to define the test case, and in C++ use
  ATF_TEST_CASE_WITHOUT_HEAD.


Changes in version 0.8
**********************

Experimental version released on May 7th, 2010.

* Test programs no longer run several test cases in a row.  The execution
  of a test program now requires a test case name, and that single test
  case is executed.  To execute several test cases, use the atf-run utility
  as usual.

* Test programs no longer fork a subprocess to isolate the execution of
  test cases.  They run the test case code in-process, and a crash of the
  test case will result in a crash of the test program.  This is to ease
  debugging of faulty test cases.

* Test programs no longer isolate their test cases.  This means that they
  will not create temporary directories nor sanitize the environment any
  more.  Yes: running a test case that depends on system state by hand will
  most likely yield different results depending on where (machine,
  directory, user environment, etc.) it is run.  Isolation has been moved
  to atf-run.

* Test programs no longer print a cryptic format (application/X-atf-tcs)
  on a special file channel.  They can now print whatever they want on the
  screen.  Because test programs can now only run one test case every time,
  providing controlled output is not necessary any more.

* Test programs no longer write their status into a special file
  descriptor.  Instead, they create a file with the results, which is later
  parsed by atf-run.  This changes the semantics of the -r flag.

* atf-run has been adjusted to perform the test case isolation.  As a
  result, there is now a single canonical place that implements the
  isolation of test caes.  In previous releases, the three language
  bindings (C, C++ and shell) had to be kept in sync with each other (read:
  not a nice thing to do at all).  As a side effect of this change, writing
  bindings for other languages will be much, much easier from now on.

* atf-run forks test programs on a test case basis, instead of on a test
  program basis as it did before.  This is to provide the test case
  isolation that was before implemented by the test programs themselves.

* Removed the atf-exec tool.  This was used to implement test case
  isolation in atf-sh, but it is now unnecessary.

* It is now optional to define the descr meta-data property.  It has been
  proven to be mostly useless, because test cases often carry a descriptive
  name of their own.


Changes in version 0.7
**********************

Experimental version released on December 22nd, 2009.

* Added build-time checks to atf-c and atf-c++.  A binding for atf-sh
  will come later.

* Migrated all build-time checks for header files to proper ATF tests.
  This demonstrates the use of the new feature described above.

* Added an internal API for child process management.

* Converted all plain-text distribution documents to a Docbook canonical
  version, and include pre-generated plain text and HTML copies in the
  distribution file.

* Simplified the contents of the Makefile.am by regenerating it from a
  canonical Makefile.am.m4 source.  As a side-effect, some dependency
  specifications were fixed.

* Migrated all checks from the check target to installcheck, as these
  require ATF to be installed.

* Fixed sign comparison mismatches triggered by the now-enabled
  -Wsign-compare.

* Fixed many memory and object leaks.


Changes in version 0.6
**********************

Experimental version released on January 18th, 2009.

* Make atf-exec be able to kill its child process after a certain period
  of time; this is controlled through the new -t option.

* Change atf-sh to use atf-exec's -t option to control the test case's
  timeouts, instead of doing it internally.  Same behavior as before, but
  noticeably faster.

* atf-exec's -g option and atf-killpg are gone due to the previous
  change.

* Added the atf-check(1) tool, a program that executes a given command
  and checks its exit code against a known value and allows the management
  of stdout and stderr in multiple ways.  This replaces the previous
  atf_check function in the atf-sh library and exposes this functionality
  to both atf-c and atf-c++.

* Added the ATF_REQUIRE family of macros to the C interface.  These help
  in checking for fatal test conditions.  The old ATF_CHECK macros now
  perform non-fatal checks only.  I.e. by using ATF_CHECK, the test case
  can now continue its execution and the failures will not be reported
  until the end of the whole run.

* Extended the amount of ATF_CHECK_* C macros with new ones to provide
  more features to the developer.  These also have their corresponding
  counterparts in the ATF_REQUIRE_* family.  The new macros (listing the
  suffixes only) are: _EQ (replaces _EQUAL), _EQ_MSG, _STREQ and
  _STREQ_MSG.


Changes in version 0.5
**********************

Experimental version released on May 1st, 2008.

* Clauses 3 and 4 of the BSD license used by the project were dropped.
  All the code is now under a 2-clause BSD license compatible with the GNU
  General Public License (GPL).

* Added a C-only binding so that binary test programs do not need to be
  tied to C++ at all.  This binding is now known as the atf-c library.

* Renamed the C++ binding to atf-c++ for consistency with the new atf-c.

* Renamed the POSIX shell binding to atf-sh for consistency with the new
  atf-c and atf-c++.

* Added a -w flag to test programs through which it is possible to
  specify the work directory to be used.  This was possible in prior
  releases by defining the workdir configuration variable (-v workdir=...),
  but was a conceptually incorrect mechanism.

* Test programs now preserve the execution order of test cases when they
  are given in the command line.  Even those mentioned more than once are
  executed multiple times to comply with the user's requests.


Changes in version 0.4
**********************

Experimental version released on February 4th, 2008.

* Added two new manual pages, atf-c++-api and atf-sh-api, describing the
  C++ and POSIX shell interfaces used to write test programs.

* Added a pkg-config file, useful to get the flags to build against the
  C++ library or to easily detect the presence of ATF.

* Added a way for test cases to require a specific architecture and/or
  machine type through the new 'require.arch' and 'require.machine'
  meta-data properties, respectively.

* Added the 'timeout' property to test cases, useful to set an
  upper-bound limit for the test's run time and thus prevent global test
  program stalls due to the test case's misbehavior.

* Added the atf-exec(1) internal utility, used to execute a command
  after changing the process group it belongs to.

* Added the atf-killpg(1) internal utility, used to kill process groups.

* Multiple portability fixes.  Of special interest, full support for
  SunOS (Solaris Express Developer Edition 2007/09) using the Sun Studio 12
  C++ compiler.

* Fixed a serious bug that prevented atf-run(1) from working at all
  under Fedora 8 x86_64.  Due to the nature of the bug, other platforms
  were likely affected too.


Changes in version 0.3
**********************

Experimental version released on November 11th, 2007.

* Added XML output support to atf-report.  This is accompanied by a DTD
  for the format's structure and sample XSLT/CSS files to post-process this
  output and convert it to a plain HTML report.

* Changed atf-run to add system information to the report it generates.
  This is currently used by atf-report's XML output only, and is later
  printed in the HTML reports in a nice and useful summary table.  The user
  and system administrator are allowed to tune this feature by means of
  hooks.

* Removed the test cases' 'isolated' property.  This was intended to
  avoid touching the file system at all when running the related test case,
  but this has not been true for a long while: some control files are
  unconditionally required for several purposes, and we cannot easily get
  rid of them.  This way we remove several critical and delicate pieces of
  code.

* Improved atf-report's CSV output format to include information about
  test programs too.

* Fixed the tests that used atf-compile to not require this tool as a
  helper.  Avoids systems without build-time utilities to skip many tests
  that could otherwise be run.  (E.g. NetBSD without the comp.tgz set
  installed.)

* Many general cleanups: Fixed many pieces of code marked as ugly and/or
  incomplete.


Changes in version 0.2
**********************

Experimental version released on September 20th, 2007.

* Test cases now get a known umask on entry.

* atf-run now detects many unexpected failures caused by test programs and
  reports them as bogus tests.  atf-report is able to handle these new
  errors and nicely reports them to the user.

* All the data formats read and written by the tools have been
  documented and cleaned up.  These include those grammars that define how
  the different components communicate with each other as well as the
  format of files written by the developers and users: the Atffiles and the
  configuration files.

* Added the atf-version tool, a utility that displays information about
  the currently installed version of ATF.

* Test cases can now define an optional cleanup routine to undo their
  actions regardless of their exit status.

* atf-report now summarizes the list of failed (bogus) test programs
  when using the ticker output format.

* Test programs now capture some termination signals and clean up any
  temporary files before exiting the program.

* Multiple bug fixes and improvements all around.


Changes in version 0.1
**********************

Experimental version released on August 20th, 2007.

* First public version.  This was released coinciding with the end of the
  Google Summer of Code 2007 program.


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