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(autoconf.info)Using Autotest

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Generating Test Suites with Autotest
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     *Note: This section describes an experimental feature which will
     be part of Autoconf in a forthcoming release.  Although we believe
     Autotest is stabilizing, this documentation describes an interface which
     might change in the future: do not depend upon Autotest without
     subscribing to the Autoconf mailing lists.*

   It is paradoxical that portable projects depend on nonportable tools
to run their test suite.  Autoconf by itself is the paragon of this
problem: although it aims at perfectly portability, up to 2.13, its test
suite was using DejaGNU, a rich and complex testing framework, but which
is far from being standard on Unix systems.  Worse yet, it was likely to
be missing on the most fragile platforms, the very platforms that are
most likely to torture Autoconf and exhibit deficiencies.

   To circumvent this problem many package maintainers have developed
their own testing framework, based on simple shell scripts whose sole
output are their exit status: the test succeeded, or failed.  In
addition, most of these tests share some common patterns, what results
in lots of duplicated code, tedious maintenance etc.

   Following exactly the same reasoning that yielded to the inception of
Autoconf, Autotest provides a test suite generation frame work, based on
M4 macros, building a portable shell script.  The suite itself is
equipped with automatic logging and tracing facilities which greatly
diminish the interaction with bug reporters, and simple timing reports.

   Autoconf itself has been using Autotest for years, and we do attest
that it has considerably improved the strength of the test suite, and
the quality of bug reports.  Other projects are known to use some
generation of Autotest, such as Bison, Free Recode, Free Wdiff, GNU
Tar, each of them having different needs, what slowly polishes Autotest
as a general testing framework.

   Nonetheless, compared to DejaGNU, Autotest is inadequate for
interactive tool testing, which is probably its main limitation.

Using an Autotest Test Suite

Autotest and the user

Writing testsuite.at

Autotest macros

testsuite Invocation

Running `testsuite' scripts

Making testsuite Scripts

Using autom4te to create `testsuite'