Re: [boost] Re: Regression tests: how long is reasonable?

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-08-12 20:43:22

At 05:17 PM 8/12/2002, William E. Kempf wrote:

 >> The trick would be to do it in a way that automates the introduction 
into
 >> status tables.
 >>
 >> For example, say the boost::shared_ptr test program wrote this to cout:
 >>
 >>      <metric type="space" description="shared_ptr<> size"
 >>        unit="bytes" value="8"></metric>
 >>
 >> Then reporting programs which were interested in could include these
 >> results in their output.  No cost to test programs which don't wish to
 >> report any size, no cost to reporting programs which don't care to 
report
 >> size metrics. No manual intervention.
 >
 >Contrary to the marketing of XML, that's really not a format that's very
 >readable to users.

But humans would not be the main readers.  Various post-process converters, 
typically to HTML, would be the most common readers.

 >  So, what I'd recommend is turning things like this into
 >a method call in Boost.Test.  The method call would be responsible for
 >generating meaningful output.  The definition of "meaningful" would then
 >depend upon need, as specified by command line options.  By default the
 >output would be generated for human consumption, but with proper command
 >line options could be reconfigured to produce XML.

That's fine with me.

 >boost::test::test_log log;
 >
 >log.report_metric(boost::space, "shared_ptr<> size", boost::bytes,
 >sizeof(shared_ptr<int>));
 >
 >c:\>test_shared_ptr -BOOST_TEST_OUTPUT=XML
 >
 >Obviously I glossed over a lot of implementation details, but does this
 >make sense?

Yes.

--Beman