In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,                  writes:
>Could you clarify the situation with a (regression,compatibility,etc)test suit
>e?
>Is there any(i haven't found any neither in a downloaded stuff nor on website)
>?

There is no current test suite for jakarta-oro and it's one of the things
holding back aggressive development of the Perl stuff toward 5.6
compatibility (it's currently 5.003 compatible with a smattering of
5.004 and 5.005'isms).  On oro-dev a while back, we agreed not to make
major changes to the code base beyond maintenance until we had developed
a new regression test suite.  We've had several volunteers at various
points, but no follow through.  I have consciously avoided moving forward
on it myself because the task is a good way to get more developers
involved (we've got a very large user base but a microscopic development
team) since the core code (what used to be OROMatcher) is very difficult
to follow.  Independent of this, because of the pace of development,
I'm pretty sure that we're going to have to branch and keep a 2.0.x
maintenance branch for minor fixes like this most recent one and plunge
the head branch into instability while making the major changes necessary
to bring the Perl stuff up to date.

>And i seem to be a voluteer to develop one, but need some help on what
>to start from.

That would be great if you have the time.  There are lots of things to
test, but the place to start is to test matches for the text.regex and
text.perl packages.  The JUnit test framework is pretty decent and
used by several Jakarta projects, so it would be preferable to implement
the tests with the JUnit framework.  Match tests should probably take
a file as input that contains a list of tests consisting of a pattern,
a piece of input, and an expected result (or results if the contents of
groups are included). That makes it very easy to add new testcases (no
coding, just edit the text file).  The tests in the Perl source in
perl5.003_07/t/op/re_tests are probably good enough as an initial set of
matching tests.  Eventually we would want more and test all of the other
stuff besides just matches.  Also, it would be ideal to be able to have
text.regex and text.perl tests also run on the particular version of Perl
they are supposed to be compatible with at the time and compare results
in order to help meet the compatibility goal.  At any rate, start small
and we'll incrementally expand over time.

daniel


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