Re: QMTest and the G++ testsuite

[Jim Wilson <wilson at redhat dot com>]

Here are a few issues that I haven't seen mentioned by anyone else yet.

There is a POSIX standard for test frameworks: POSIX 1003.3.  DejaGNU conforms
to this standard.  There is some info about this in the DejaGNU documentation.
This standard was mainly created for testsuites for testing POSIX conformance,
but it is still a useful standard for generic test frameworks.

DejaGNU support for multiple tests per file is useful for supporting non-GNU
testsuites.  PlumHall for instance has files that contain thousands of tests.
It is useful to get an exact count of passes and failures from each file.
It is unlikely that we will convince PlumHall that their testsuite was designed
wrong, and it would be inconvenient to try to write a test framework that
explicitly reports each individual test.

DejaGNU is a GNU tool owned by the FSF, QMTest is not.  QMTest includes code
from third parties with varying copyright notices.  The zope-dtml package for
instance has an advertising clause, which may be incompatible with the GPL.
zope-dtml includes a copyright notice which requires that it be included in
binary releases, but I don't see a copy of this in your binary release.  The
xmlrpc package has a copyright that requires that the copyright message be
included in supporting documentation.  PyXML has 8 different copyrights.  Two
of them require that the copyright message appear in supporting documentation.
Well, maybe we can claim that the source is supporting documentation.

I haven't tried running it, but I will try to find time for that so I can
give more comments.

Jim