[openssl-dev] testing framework

[Richard Levitte]

In message <CAMRSN0DUyBwtfKwHHqyFMr7+vUryJDzm+pd+Jg2ih_FFqd8sig at mail.gmail.com> on Tue, 15 Sep 2015 00:30:24 +0300, Sebastian Brestin <sebastianbrestin at gmail.com> said:

sebastianbrestin> Hi guys,
sebastianbrestin> 
sebastianbrestin> I just joined your community over here. Quick
sebastianbrestin> question: why have you chosen Test:More as a testing
sebastianbrestin> framework rather than gtest or another framework? I
sebastianbrestin> would be interested over the unit testing area if
sebastianbrestin> there are any plans in this direction.

Considering I made the choice, I guess I should be able to answer.

Choosing Perl as a basis for test scripts was among the earliest
decisions I made in this effort.  Perl is supported on a very wide
range of platforms.  In that sense, it's cooler than most other
scripting languages.  It's even cooler than python (although I
understand that python is pretty widely supported).

The next thing was to have a look at available and suitable
frameworks, or possibly building my own, and factoring in that we need
to have it work for versions of Perl that are possibly not super
recent.  A bit of research and I came back to Test::More and
Test::Harness.  They've been along for a very long time, and the
feature set we do use has been around since Perl 5.12.  That should be
old enough to be available on most current platforms even if they
aren't super fresh.

Basically, of the factors that came into play, these are the most
prominent:

- I wanted to set up something that could work consistently on a very
  wide range of platforms.
- I went along with a culture we've had with OpenSSL for a long time,
  to be quite careful with what we choose to depend on, and actually
  keep that to a minimum.  The rationale behind that choice is that
  the things we depend on also have a tendency to limit the range of
  platforms we can support.
- We already use Perl quite extensively.

The choice was actually quite easy.

Oh, and should you wonder, Unix like platforms and Windows isn't
enough.  I factored in VMS as well, and am hoping have tested this on
Unix, Windows and VMS will be enough to cover most oddities possible.

Cheers,
Richard

-- 
Richard Levitte                         richard at levitte.org
                                        http://richard.levitte.org/

"Life is a tremendous celebration - and I'm invited!"
-- from a friend's blog, translated from Swedish