Re: Test Modules

[Tristan Van Berkom <tristanvb openismus com>]

On Wed, 2013-03-06 at 11:56 +0000, John Emmas wrote:
> I recently built libglib (version 2) using MSVC.  I noticed that there 
> are several dozen test modules available (i.e. 'C' source modules) but 
> it looks as if they all need to be built as individual apps.  Does 
> anyone think it would be a good idea to have one app that could run all 
> the tests?  Or is that in fact already available somehow?

There are 2 brands of tests in glib (or 3, depending how you perceive
them)

 a.) Unit tests - tests which require no interaction and include 
     assertions, these are automatically run by 'make check' to
     ensure that a given build passes these requirements

 b.) Functional tests, i.e. programs which might require user
     interaction and as such cannot be run as a step in 'make check'
     these also can be run to test/debug various aspects of the
     software

 c.) Some functional tests can also be perceived as 'demos', some
     of them are advertised as such (i.e. they are compilable
     working code linked directly into the glib/gio documentation).

I don't see any advantage of combining any of these test cases
into a single program, do you ?

Is this question stemming from the fact that you got glib to
compile using MSVC, where I suppose you are hacking the source
tree severely and not using the autotools/makefiles at all ?

I do recall there was a time that compiling glib with MSVC
was needed in order to create more compatible binaries, is
this still the case ? is there any reason to not use a
more standard/friendly toolchain like MSYS/mingw where
the same configure.ac/Makefiles can be used without modification ?
Where 'make check' is undoubtedly useful ?

Cheers,
        -Tristan