Adding new "test interfaces" to work with Kyua?

[Julio Merino]

On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 11:21 PM, Alan Somers <asomers at freebsd.org> wrote:
> It looks like you're interfacing to TAP through its command-line
> interface.  Unfortunately, as your man page notes, that means that
> "kyua list" can't list bundled tests, and thus it will treat them as a
> single unit.
>
> Within FreeBSD, most if not all of the TAP-based tests use Perl's
> Prove module.  Have you considered writing a Prove backend for Kyua
> instead of a TAP backend?  If you write it in Perl, it could have much
> more intimate access to the tests.  Instead of interfacing through the
> CLI, it could dynamically load the tests and interrogate them
> directly.

I hadn't considered that, but it is a good idea. However, having
separate TAP and Prove backends are not mutually exclusive goals.

That said, I don't find the Prove backend a pressing need nor I think
it's as useful as a TAP backend, at least for the time being: what I'd
like is a simple way to transition existing tests to the new layout,
and the TAP backend works for that -- with the added benefit that it
works also for non-Perl tests! Later on, if people want to keep the
Perl-based tests and make them more versatile within Kyua, we can do
that pretty easily.

(And of course, if anyone wants to start writing a more versatile
backend explicitly for Perl tests anyway, please do!)

-- 
Julio Merino / @jmmv