Hi John, > Wouldn't having a TAP <https://testanything.org/> harness be > preferable to hand-spun shell-scripts?
I've just read the specification and I don't think it buys us much. Something still needs to set up the test, run it, echo `ok' for TAP, and clean up, and something above that needs to run a bunch of tests. TAP just seems to summarise ok lines and spot they may have been too few? > I was rather shocked to learn such a widely-used program as Groff had > such minimal test coverage. Testing the output of binary formats is > understandably difficult, but I think most of those pains can be > alleviated by testing against Groff's intermediate output format > first, and then having unit tests assert proper transformation after. And testing by cmp(1)-ing two canonical PPMs, each containing a page rendered by Ghostscript, one golden, the other new, would also catch a lot of regressions for little work, leaving what exactly had caused the pixels to change as a task for `git bisect'. It would have caught things like https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/groff/+bug/42764 -- Cheers, Ralph.
