xref: /freebsd/contrib/atf/NEWS (revision c6063d0da8e1f8d8452b0c2ee1c7ad718c1a7052)
1Major changes between releases                  Automated Testing Framework
2===========================================================================
3
4
5Changes in version 0.20
6***********************
7
8Experimental version released on February 7th, 2014.
9
10This is the first release without the code for the deprecated tools.  If
11you require such code, please fetch a copy of the 0.19 release and extract
12the 'tools' directory for your own consumption.
13
14* Removed the deprecated tools.  This includes atf-config, atf-report,
15  atf-run and atf-version.
16
17
18Changes in version 0.19
19***********************
20
21Experimental version released on February 7th, 2014.
22
23This is the last release to bundle the code for the deprecated tools.
24The next release will drop their code and will stop worrying about
25backwards compatibility between the ATF libraries and what the old tools
26may or may not support.
27
28If you still require the old tools for some reason, grab a copy of the
29'tools' directory now.  The code in this directory is standalone and
30does not depend on any internal details of atf-c++ any longer.
31
32* Various fixes and improvements to support running as part of the FreeBSD
33  test suite.
34
35* Project hosting moved from Google Code (as a subproject of Kyua) to
36  GitHub (as a first-class project).  The main reason for the change is
37  the suppression of binary downloads in Google Code on Jan 15th, 2014.
38  See https://github.com/jmmv/atf/
39
40* Removed builtin help from atf-sh(1) and atf-check(1) for simplicity
41  reasons.  In other words, their -h option is gone.
42
43* Moved the code of the deprecated tools into a 'tools' directory and
44  completely decoupled their code from the internals of atf-c++.  The
45  reason for this is to painlessly allow a third-party to maintain a
46  copy of these tools after we delete them because upcoming changes to
47  atf-c++ would break the stale tools.
48
49
50Changes in version 0.18
51***********************
52
53Experimental version released on November 16th, 2013.
54
55* Issue 45: Added require.memory support in atf-run for FreeBSD.
56
57* Fixed an issue with the handling of cin with libc++.
58
59* Issue 64: Fixed various mandoc formatting warnings.
60
61* NetBSD PR bin/48284: Made atf-check flush its progress message to
62  stdout so that an interrupted test case always shows the last message
63  being executed.
64
65* NetBSD PR bin/48285: Fixed atf_check examples in atf-sh-api(3).
66
67
68Changes in version 0.17
69***********************
70
71Experimental version released on February 14th, 2013.
72
73* Added the atf_utils_cat_file, atf_utils_compare_file,
74  atf_utils_copy_file, atf_utils_create_file, atf_utils_file_exists,
75  atf_utils_fork, atf_utils_grep_file, atf_utils_grep_string,
76  atf_utils_readline, atf_utils_redirect and atf_utils_wait utility
77  functions to atf-c-api.  Documented the already-public
78  atf_utils_free_charpp function.
79
80* Added the cat_file, compare_file, copy_file, create_file, file_exists,
81  fork, grep_collection, grep_file, grep_string, redirect and wait
82  functions to the atf::utils namespace of atf-c++-api.  These are
83  wrappers around the same functions added to the atf-c-api library.
84
85* Added the ATF_CHECK_MATCH, ATF_CHECK_MATCH_MSG, ATF_REQUIRE_MATCH and
86  ATF_REQUIRE_MATCH_MSG macros to atf-c to simplify the validation of a
87  string against a regular expression.
88
89* Miscellaneous fixes for manpage typos and compilation problems with
90  clang.
91
92* Added caching of the results of those configure tests that rely on
93  executing a test program.  This should help crossbuild systems by
94  providing a mechanism to pre-specify what the results should be.
95
96* PR bin/45690: Make atf-report convert any non-printable characters to
97  a plain-text representation (matching their corresponding hexadecimal
98  entities) in XML output files.  This is to prevent the output of test
99  cases from breaking xsltproc later.
100
101
102Changes in version 0.16
103***********************
104
105Experimental version released on July 10th, 2012.
106
107* Added a --enable-tools flag to configure to request the build of the
108  deprecated ATF tools, whose build is now disabled by default.  In order
109  to continue running tests, you should migrate to Kyua instead of enabling
110  the build of the deprecated tools.  The kyua-atf-compat package provides
111  transitional compatibility versions of atf-run and atf-report built on
112  top of Kyua.
113
114* Tweaked the ATF_TEST_CASE macro of atf-c++ so that the compiler can
115  detect defined but unused test cases.
116
117* PR bin/45859: Fixed some XSLT bugs that resulted in the tc-time and
118  tp-time XML tags leaking into the generated HTML file.  Also improved
119  the CSS file slightly to correct alignment and color issues with the
120  timestamps column.
121
122* Optimized atf-c++/macros.hpp so that GNU G++ consumes less memory during
123  compilation with GNU G++.
124
125* Flipped the default to building shared libraries for atf-c and atf-c++,
126  and started versioning them.  As a side-effect, this removes the
127  --enable-unstable-shared flag from configure that appears to not work any
128  more (under NetBSD).  Additionally, some distributions require the use of
129  shared libraries for proper dependency tracking (e.g. Fedora), so it is
130  better if we do the right versioning upstream.
131
132* Project hosting moved from an adhoc solution (custom web site and
133  Monotone repository) to Google Code (standard wiki and Git).  ATF now
134  lives in a subcomponent of the Kyua project.
135
136
137Changes in version 0.15
138***********************
139
140Experimental version released on January 16th, 2012.
141
142* Respect stdin in atf-check.  The previous release silenced stdin for any
143  processes spawned by atf, not only test programs, which caused breakage
144  in tests that pipe data through atf-check.
145
146* Performance improvements to atf-sh.
147
148* Enabled detection of unused parameters and variables in the code and
149  fixed all warnings.
150
151* Changed the behavior of "developer mode".  Compiler warnings are now
152  enabled unconditionally regardless of whether we are in developer mode or
153  not; developer mode is now only used to perform strict warning checks and
154  to enable assertions.  Additionally, developer mode is now only
155  automatically enabled when building from the repository, not for formal
156  releases.
157
158* Added new Autoconf M4 macros (ATF_ARG_WITH, ATF_CHECK_C and
159  ATF_CHECK_CXX) to provide a consistent way of defining a --with-arg flag
160  in configure scripts and detecting the presence of any of the ATF
161  bindings.  Note that ATF_CHECK_SH was already introduced in 0.14, but it
162  has now been modified to also honor --with-atf if instantiated.
163
164* Added timing support to atf-run / atf-report.
165
166* Added support for a 'require.memory' property, to specify the minimum
167  amount of physical memory needed by the test case to yield valid results.
168
169* PR bin/45690: Force an ISO-8859-1 encoding in the XML files generated by
170  atf-report so that invalid data in the output of test cases does not
171  mangle our report.
172
173
174Changes in version 0.14
175***********************
176
177Experimental version released on June 14th, 2011.
178
179* Added a pkg-config file for atf-sh and an aclocal file to ease the
180  detection of atf-sh from autoconf scripts.
181
182* Made the default test case body defined by atf_sh fail.  This is to
183  ensure that test cases are properly defined in test programs and helps
184  in catching typos in the names of the body functions.
185
186* PR bin/44882: Made atf-run connect the stdin of test cases to /dev/zero.
187  This provides more consistent results with "normal" execution (in
188  particular, when tests are executed detached from a terminal).
189
190* Made atf-run hardcode TZ=UTC for test cases.  It used to undefine TZ, but
191  that does not take into account that libc determines the current timezone
192  from a configuration file.
193
194* All test programs will now print a warning when they are not run through
195  atf-run(1) stating that this is unsupported and may deliver incorrect
196  results.
197
198* Added support for the 'require.files' test-case property.  This allows
199  test cases to specify installed files that must be present for the test
200  case to run.
201
202
203Changes in version 0.13
204***********************
205
206Experimental version released on March 31st, 2011.
207
208This is the first release after the creation of the Kyua project, a more
209modular and reliable replacement for ATF.  From now on, ATF will change to
210accomodate the transition to this new codebase, but ATF will still continue
211to see development in the short/medium term.  Check out the project page at
212http://code.google.com/p/kyua/ for more details.
213
214The changes in this release are:
215
216* Added support to run the tests with the Kyua runtime engine (kyua-cli), a
217  new package that aims to replace atf-run and atf-report.  The ATF tests
218  can be run with the new system by issuing a 'make installcheck-kyua' from
219  the top-level directory of the project (assuming the 'kyua' binary is
220  available during the configuration stage of ATF).
221
222* atf-run and atf-report are now in maintenance mode (but *not* deprecated
223  yet!).  Kyua already implements a new, much more reliable runtime engine
224  that provides similar features to these tools.  That said, it is not
225  complete yet so all development efforts should go towards it.
226
227* If GDB is installed, atf-run dumps the stack trace of crashing test
228  programs in an attempt to aid debugging.  Contributed by Antti Kantee.
229
230* Reverted default timeout change in previous release and reset its value
231  to 5 minutes.  This was causing several issues, specially when running
232  the existing NetBSD test suite in qemu.
233
234* Fixed the 'match' output checker in atf-check to properly validate the
235  last line of a file even if it does not have a newline.
236
237* Added the ATF_REQUIRE_IN and ATF_REQUIRE_NOT_IN macros to atf-c++ to
238  check for the presence (or lack thereof) of an element in a collection.
239
240* PR bin/44176: Fixed a race condition in atf-run that would crash atf-run
241  when the cleanup of a test case triggered asynchronous modifications to
242  its work directory (e.g. killing a daemon process that cleans up a pid
243  file in the work directory).
244
245* PR bin/44301: Fixed the sample XSLT file to report bogus test programs
246  instead of just listing them as having 0 test cases.
247
248
249Changes in version 0.12
250***********************
251
252Experimental version released on November 7th, 2010.
253
254* Added the ATF_REQUIRE_THROW_RE to atf-c++, which is the same as
255  ATF_REQUIRE_THROW but allows checking for the validity of the exception's
256  error message by means of a regular expression.
257
258* Added the ATF_REQUIRE_MATCH to atf-c++, which allows checking for a
259  regular expression match in a string.
260
261* Changed the default timeout for test cases from 5 minutes to 30 seconds.
262  30 seconds is long enough for virtually all tests to complete, and 5
263  minutes is a way too long pause in a test suite where a single test case
264  stalls.
265
266* Deprecated the use.fs property.  While this seemed like a good idea in
267  the first place to impose more control on what test cases can do, it
268  turns out to be bad.  First, use.fs=false prevents bogus test cases
269  from dumping core so after-the-fact debugging is harder.  Second,
270  supporting use.fs adds a lot of unnecessary complexity.  atf-run will
271  now ignore any value provided to use.fs and will allow test cases to
272  freely access the file system if they wish to.
273
274* Added the atf_tc_get_config_var_as_{bool,long}{,_wd} functions to the atf-c
275  library.  The 'text' module became private in 0.11 but was being used
276  externally to simplify the parsing of configuration variables.
277
278* Made atf-run recognize the 'unprivileged-user' configuration variable
279  and automatically drop root privileges when a test case sets
280  require.user=unprivileged.  Note that this is, by no means, done for
281  security purposes; this is just for user convenience; tests should, in
282  general, not be blindly run as root in the first place.
283
284
285Changes in version 0.11
286***********************
287
288Experimental version released on October 20th, 2010.
289
290* The ATF_CHECK* macros in atf-c++ were renamed to ATF_REQUIRE* to match
291  their counterparts in atf-c.
292
293* Clearly separated the modules in atf-c that are supposed to be public
294  from those that are implementation details.  The header files for the
295  internal modules are not installed any more.
296
297* Made the atf-check tool private.  It is only required by atf-sh and being
298  public has the danger of causing confusion.  Also, making it private
299  simplifies the public API of atf.
300
301* Changed atf-sh to enable per-command error checking (set -e) by default.
302  This catches many cases in which a test case is broken but it is not
303  reported as such because execution continues.
304
305* Fixed the XSTL and CSS stylesheets to support expected failures.
306
307
308Changes in version 0.10
309***********************
310
311Experimental version released on July 2nd, 2010.
312
313Miscellaneous features
314
315* Added expected failures support to test cases and atf-run.  These
316  include, for example, expected clean exits, expected reception of fatal
317  signals, expected timeouts and expected errors in condition checks.
318  These statuses can be used to denote test cases that are known to fail
319  due to a bug in the code they are testing.  atf-report reports these
320  tests separately but they do not count towards the failed test cases
321  amount.
322
323* Added the ATF_CHECK_ERRNO and ATF_REQUIRE_ERRNO to the C library to
324  allow easy checking of call failures that update errno.
325
326* Added the has.cleanup meta-data property to test caes that specifies
327  whether the test case has a cleanup routine or not; its value is
328  automatically set.  This property is read by atf-run to know if it has to
329  run the cleanup routine; skipping this run for every test case
330  significantly speeds up the run time of test suites.
331
332* Reversed the order of the ATF_CHECK_THROW macro in the C++ binding to
333  take the expected exception as the first argument and the statement to
334  execute as the second argument.
335
336Changes in atf-check
337
338* Changed atf-check to support negating the status and output checks by
339  prefixing them with not- and added support to specify multiple checkers
340  for stdout and stderr, not only one.
341
342* Added the match output checker to atf-check to look for regular
343  expressions in the stdout and stderr of commands.
344
345* Modified the exit checks in atf-check to support checking for the
346  reception of signals.
347
348Code simplifications and cleanups
349
350* Removed usage messages from test programs to simplify the
351  implementation of every binding by a significant amount.  They just now
352  refer the user to the appropriate manual page and do not attempt to wrap
353  lines on terminal boundaries.  Test programs are not supposed to be run
354  by users directly so this minor interface regression is not important.
355
356* Removed the atf-format internal utility, which is unused after the
357  change documented above.
358
359* Removed the atf-cleanup internal utility.  It has been unused since the
360  test case isolation was moved to atf-run in 0.8
361
362* Splitted the Makefile.am into smaller files for easier maintenance and
363  dropped the use of M4.  Only affects users building from the repository
364  sources.
365
366* Intermixed tests with the source files in the source tree to provide
367  them more visibility and easier access.  The tests directory is gone from
368  the source tree and tests are now suffixed by _test, not prefixed by t_.
369
370* Simplifications to the atf-c library: removed the io, tcr and ui
371  modules as they had become unnecessary after all simplifications
372  introduced since the 0.8 release.
373
374* Removed the application/X-atf-tcr format introduced in 0.8 release.
375  Tests now print a much simplified format that is easy to parse and nicer
376  to read by end users.  As a side effect, the default for test cases is
377  now to print their results to stdout unless otherwise stated by providing
378  the -r flag.
379
380* Removed XML distribution documents and replaced them with plain-text
381  documents.  They provided little value and introduced a lot of complexity
382  to the build system.
383
384* Simplified the output of atf-version by not attempting to print a
385  revision number when building form a distfile.  Makes the build system
386  easier to maintain.
387
388
389Changes in version 0.9
390**********************
391
392Experimental version released on June 3rd, 2010.
393
394* Added atf-sh, an interpreter to process test programs written using
395  the shell API.  This is not really a shell interpreter by itself though:
396  it is just a wrapper around the system shell that eases the loading of
397  the necessary ATF libraries.
398
399* Removed atf-compile in favour of atf-sh.
400
401* Added the use.fs metadata property to test case, which is used to
402  specify which test cases require file system access.  This is to
403  highlight dependencies on external resources more clearly and to speed up
404  the execution of test suites by skipping the creation of many unnecessary
405  work directories.
406
407* Fixed test programs to get a sane default value for their source
408  directory.  This means that it should not be necessary any more to pass
409  -s when running test programs that do not live in the current directory.
410
411* Defining test case headers became optional.  This is trivial to achieve
412  in shell-based tests but a bit ugly in C and C++.  In C, use the new
413  ATF_TC_WITHOUT_HEAD macro to define the test case, and in C++ use
414  ATF_TEST_CASE_WITHOUT_HEAD.
415
416
417Changes in version 0.8
418**********************
419
420Experimental version released on May 7th, 2010.
421
422* Test programs no longer run several test cases in a row.  The execution
423  of a test program now requires a test case name, and that single test
424  case is executed.  To execute several test cases, use the atf-run utility
425  as usual.
426
427* Test programs no longer fork a subprocess to isolate the execution of
428  test cases.  They run the test case code in-process, and a crash of the
429  test case will result in a crash of the test program.  This is to ease
430  debugging of faulty test cases.
431
432* Test programs no longer isolate their test cases.  This means that they
433  will not create temporary directories nor sanitize the environment any
434  more.  Yes: running a test case that depends on system state by hand will
435  most likely yield different results depending on where (machine,
436  directory, user environment, etc.) it is run.  Isolation has been moved
437  to atf-run.
438
439* Test programs no longer print a cryptic format (application/X-atf-tcs)
440  on a special file channel.  They can now print whatever they want on the
441  screen.  Because test programs can now only run one test case every time,
442  providing controlled output is not necessary any more.
443
444* Test programs no longer write their status into a special file
445  descriptor.  Instead, they create a file with the results, which is later
446  parsed by atf-run.  This changes the semantics of the -r flag.
447
448* atf-run has been adjusted to perform the test case isolation.  As a
449  result, there is now a single canonical place that implements the
450  isolation of test caes.  In previous releases, the three language
451  bindings (C, C++ and shell) had to be kept in sync with each other (read:
452  not a nice thing to do at all).  As a side effect of this change, writing
453  bindings for other languages will be much, much easier from now on.
454
455* atf-run forks test programs on a test case basis, instead of on a test
456  program basis as it did before.  This is to provide the test case
457  isolation that was before implemented by the test programs themselves.
458
459* Removed the atf-exec tool.  This was used to implement test case
460  isolation in atf-sh, but it is now unnecessary.
461
462* It is now optional to define the descr meta-data property.  It has been
463  proven to be mostly useless, because test cases often carry a descriptive
464  name of their own.
465
466
467Changes in version 0.7
468**********************
469
470Experimental version released on December 22nd, 2009.
471
472* Added build-time checks to atf-c and atf-c++.  A binding for atf-sh
473  will come later.
474
475* Migrated all build-time checks for header files to proper ATF tests.
476  This demonstrates the use of the new feature described above.
477
478* Added an internal API for child process management.
479
480* Converted all plain-text distribution documents to a Docbook canonical
481  version, and include pre-generated plain text and HTML copies in the
482  distribution file.
483
484* Simplified the contents of the Makefile.am by regenerating it from a
485  canonical Makefile.am.m4 source.  As a side-effect, some dependency
486  specifications were fixed.
487
488* Migrated all checks from the check target to installcheck, as these
489  require ATF to be installed.
490
491* Fixed sign comparison mismatches triggered by the now-enabled
492  -Wsign-compare.
493
494* Fixed many memory and object leaks.
495
496
497Changes in version 0.6
498**********************
499
500Experimental version released on January 18th, 2009.
501
502* Make atf-exec be able to kill its child process after a certain period
503  of time; this is controlled through the new -t option.
504
505* Change atf-sh to use atf-exec's -t option to control the test case's
506  timeouts, instead of doing it internally.  Same behavior as before, but
507  noticeably faster.
508
509* atf-exec's -g option and atf-killpg are gone due to the previous
510  change.
511
512* Added the atf-check(1) tool, a program that executes a given command
513  and checks its exit code against a known value and allows the management
514  of stdout and stderr in multiple ways.  This replaces the previous
515  atf_check function in the atf-sh library and exposes this functionality
516  to both atf-c and atf-c++.
517
518* Added the ATF_REQUIRE family of macros to the C interface.  These help
519  in checking for fatal test conditions.  The old ATF_CHECK macros now
520  perform non-fatal checks only.  I.e. by using ATF_CHECK, the test case
521  can now continue its execution and the failures will not be reported
522  until the end of the whole run.
523
524* Extended the amount of ATF_CHECK_* C macros with new ones to provide
525  more features to the developer.  These also have their corresponding
526  counterparts in the ATF_REQUIRE_* family.  The new macros (listing the
527  suffixes only) are: _EQ (replaces _EQUAL), _EQ_MSG, _STREQ and
528  _STREQ_MSG.
529
530
531Changes in version 0.5
532**********************
533
534Experimental version released on May 1st, 2008.
535
536* Clauses 3 and 4 of the BSD license used by the project were dropped.
537  All the code is now under a 2-clause BSD license compatible with the GNU
538  General Public License (GPL).
539
540* Added a C-only binding so that binary test programs do not need to be
541  tied to C++ at all.  This binding is now known as the atf-c library.
542
543* Renamed the C++ binding to atf-c++ for consistency with the new atf-c.
544
545* Renamed the POSIX shell binding to atf-sh for consistency with the new
546  atf-c and atf-c++.
547
548* Added a -w flag to test programs through which it is possible to
549  specify the work directory to be used.  This was possible in prior
550  releases by defining the workdir configuration variable (-v workdir=...),
551  but was a conceptually incorrect mechanism.
552
553* Test programs now preserve the execution order of test cases when they
554  are given in the command line.  Even those mentioned more than once are
555  executed multiple times to comply with the user's requests.
556
557
558Changes in version 0.4
559**********************
560
561Experimental version released on February 4th, 2008.
562
563* Added two new manual pages, atf-c++-api and atf-sh-api, describing the
564  C++ and POSIX shell interfaces used to write test programs.
565
566* Added a pkg-config file, useful to get the flags to build against the
567  C++ library or to easily detect the presence of ATF.
568
569* Added a way for test cases to require a specific architecture and/or
570  machine type through the new 'require.arch' and 'require.machine'
571  meta-data properties, respectively.
572
573* Added the 'timeout' property to test cases, useful to set an
574  upper-bound limit for the test's run time and thus prevent global test
575  program stalls due to the test case's misbehavior.
576
577* Added the atf-exec(1) internal utility, used to execute a command
578  after changing the process group it belongs to.
579
580* Added the atf-killpg(1) internal utility, used to kill process groups.
581
582* Multiple portability fixes.  Of special interest, full support for
583  SunOS (Solaris Express Developer Edition 2007/09) using the Sun Studio 12
584  C++ compiler.
585
586* Fixed a serious bug that prevented atf-run(1) from working at all
587  under Fedora 8 x86_64.  Due to the nature of the bug, other platforms
588  were likely affected too.
589
590
591Changes in version 0.3
592**********************
593
594Experimental version released on November 11th, 2007.
595
596* Added XML output support to atf-report.  This is accompanied by a DTD
597  for the format's structure and sample XSLT/CSS files to post-process this
598  output and convert it to a plain HTML report.
599
600* Changed atf-run to add system information to the report it generates.
601  This is currently used by atf-report's XML output only, and is later
602  printed in the HTML reports in a nice and useful summary table.  The user
603  and system administrator are allowed to tune this feature by means of
604  hooks.
605
606* Removed the test cases' 'isolated' property.  This was intended to
607  avoid touching the file system at all when running the related test case,
608  but this has not been true for a long while: some control files are
609  unconditionally required for several purposes, and we cannot easily get
610  rid of them.  This way we remove several critical and delicate pieces of
611  code.
612
613* Improved atf-report's CSV output format to include information about
614  test programs too.
615
616* Fixed the tests that used atf-compile to not require this tool as a
617  helper.  Avoids systems without build-time utilities to skip many tests
618  that could otherwise be run.  (E.g. NetBSD without the comp.tgz set
619  installed.)
620
621* Many general cleanups: Fixed many pieces of code marked as ugly and/or
622  incomplete.
623
624
625Changes in version 0.2
626**********************
627
628Experimental version released on September 20th, 2007.
629
630* Test cases now get a known umask on entry.
631
632* atf-run now detects many unexpected failures caused by test programs and
633  reports them as bogus tests.  atf-report is able to handle these new
634  errors and nicely reports them to the user.
635
636* All the data formats read and written by the tools have been
637  documented and cleaned up.  These include those grammars that define how
638  the different components communicate with each other as well as the
639  format of files written by the developers and users: the Atffiles and the
640  configuration files.
641
642* Added the atf-version tool, a utility that displays information about
643  the currently installed version of ATF.
644
645* Test cases can now define an optional cleanup routine to undo their
646  actions regardless of their exit status.
647
648* atf-report now summarizes the list of failed (bogus) test programs
649  when using the ticker output format.
650
651* Test programs now capture some termination signals and clean up any
652  temporary files before exiting the program.
653
654* Multiple bug fixes and improvements all around.
655
656
657Changes in version 0.1
658**********************
659
660Experimental version released on August 20th, 2007.
661
662* First public version.  This was released coinciding with the end of the
663  Google Summer of Code 2007 program.
664
665
666===========================================================================
667vim: filetype=text:textwidth=75:expandtab:shiftwidth=2:softtabstop=2
668