Hi, Reuben Thomas <r...@sc3d.org> writes:
> The documentation says: "It's not uncommon, especially during early > development stages, that some tests fail for known reasons, and that > the developer doesn't want > to tackle these failures immediately (this is especially true when the > failing tests deal with corner cases)." > > Another common use for "expected failure" is to write tests to check > that error conditions arise as expected, for example, by checking that > a program raises an error when given invalid input. I agree that XFAIL can be ambiguous, however I think this usage is not desirable. It gives an additional opposite meaning to XFAIL symbol which makes it even more confusing. > If that's a reasonable use of automake's test harness, perhaps the > documentation could reflect that, e.g. by adding: > > "Another use for XFAIL is to mark tests that are supposed to fail, for > example, to check that a program raises an error when given invalid > input." > > It is often easier to write expected-to-fail tests this way (so that > they can all look the same), rather than have to have, for example, an > extra driver that converts expected errors into success codes for the > automake test harness. What do you mean precisely by “an extra driver”? Thanks -- Mathieu Lirzin
