[zeromq-dev] Testing framework

[Martin Lucina]

Hi Stefan,

staffan at spotify.com said:
> Are there any plans to migrate libzmq to use a more fully-featured testing
> framework (e.g. googletest)?

Not at the moment, but it's mostly a case of finding someone interested and
persistent enough to do the work.

I believe that Steven McCoy was working on something with googletest at
some stage, not sure how far he got.

> The current automake test system is a bit of a
> pain to work with since it's missing stuff like a nice way to group related
> tests, a standardized way to do fixtures, sensible messages from failed
> assertions, etc.

While googletest does seem to have more features, at least some of the
above (sensible messages, for example) could be achieved by improving the
existing test programs.

It'd be nice if someone volunteered to improve the existing testsuite (or
create a new one, assuming it's at least as good as the existing one). I
know that some of the language bindings (Python, Ruby) have extensive test
suites which would be a good start.

> Aside from an added (compile-time) dependency, are there any reasons why the
> automake way is preferable?

Portability? We currently have autobuilds on all the following platforms
(more welcome, btw):

http://www.zeromq.org/docs:builds

>From the googletest site it's unclear how good the support for at least
Solaris and FreeBSD is, and dropping those platforms would be a regression.

-mato