Migrating tools/regression/ tests (and dealing with TAP)

[Julio Merino]

Hello all,

Here come sample patches to move existing tests in tools/regression/bin
to the new layout ('tests' subdirectories within the corresponding tools)
and to hook these tests into the test suite.

The patches are quite straightforward: I just did an 'svn mv' of the
existing shell scripts files, wrote a Makefile using plain.test.mk (here
is where things get interesting) and applied minor changes to get all
things sorted out (e.g. mtree directory registration).

Consider this a non-working proof of concept.  Again: this does NOT work
(well, it does, but yields invalid results).  The problem is that
TAP-based test programs (like the ones to be run by prove) do NOT report
1 on failure and thus the plain Kyua interface is unsuitable because it
always reports everything as passed.

There are two solutions:

1) Patch every existing TAP-based test to propagate a 1 error code if
   any of its tests fails.  Doable, yes, but it will take a while.
   (Mind you: this is the approach we tried in NetBSD and not all old
   tests are gone yet, years later... it's a significant amount of work
   to manually tweak all test programs!)

   I'd rather keep existing code as is *for now*; it simplifies the
   review of the changes and it doesn't immediately break people's
   knowledge of existing test code.  (If there is a need for a rewrite,
   I'd suggest to go and use the ATF interface instead.  But that's even
   more work.)

2) Add a TAP-compliant backend to Kyua.  This would allow us to plug
   pretty much all existing tests in tools/regression/ without changes
   to the code.  I believe this is a worthy goal for the transitional
   step and an easy first cut.

   But this means I've gotta implement this backend (fun!).  I've been
   reading the protocol and seems reasonably simple, so I expect to have
   something workable this week.

I'm choosing option 2 for now while leaving open the option of rewriting
tests using ATF *only after* they have been hooked into the build.
(What I'm shooting for, if you haven't guessed yet, is having a single
tests tree instead of 3 in src ASAP...  Keeping multiple trees is not a
pretty situation for long.

Once the new Kyua backend is ready, the proposed patches in this mail
should change minimally: basically do s/plain/prove/ in the Makefiles.
This is why I'm sending this mail out already: you can get a pretty
good idea of what I'd like to do and your feedback would be useful!

There is a "tricky" side change to be made to bsd.progs.mk so that it is
possible to have a directory with SCRIPTS but no PROGS.  make tinderbox
is happy.

Comments?

Thanks!
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