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NEWS revision 1.1
      1                      Automated Testing Framework (atf)
      2                         The NetBSD Foundation, Inc.
      3 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
      4 
      5 
      6 Version 0.6
      7 ===========
      8 
      9 Release date: January 18th, 2009
     10 Status:       Experimental
     11 
     12 * Make atf-exec be able to kill its child process after a certain period of
     13   time; this is controlled through the new -t option.
     14 
     15 * Change atf-sh to use atf-exec's -t option to control the test case's
     16   timeouts, instead of doing it internally.  Same behavior as before, but
     17   noticeably faster.
     18 
     19 * atf-exec's -g option and atf-killpg are gone due to the previous change.
     20 
     21 * Added the atf-check(1) tool, a program that executes a given command and
     22   checks its exit code against a known value and allows the management of
     23   stdout and stderr in multiple ways.  This replaces the previous atf_check
     24   function in the atf-sh library and exposes this functionality to both
     25   atf-c and atf-c++.
     26 
     27 * Added the ATF_REQUIRE family of macros to the C interface.  These help
     28   in checking for fatal test conditions.  The old ATF_CHECK macros now
     29   perform non-fatal checks only.  I.e. by using ATF_CHECK, the test case
     30   can now continue its execution and the failures will not be reported
     31   until the end of the whole run.
     32 
     33 * Extended the amount of ATF_CHECK_* C macros with new ones to provide more
     34   features to the developer.  These also have their corresponding
     35   counterparts in the ATF_REQUIRE_* family.  The new macros (listing the
     36   suffixes only) are: _EQ (replaces _EQUAL), _EQ_MSG, _STREQ and
     37   _STREQ_MSG.
     38 
     39 
     40 Version 0.5
     41 ===========
     42 
     43 Release date: May 1st, 2008
     44 Status:       Experimental
     45 
     46 * Clauses 3 and 4 of the BSD license used by the project were dropped.
     47   All the code is now under a 2-clause BSD license compatible with the
     48   GNU General Public License (GPL).
     49 
     50 * Added a C-only binding so that binary test programs do not need to be
     51   tied to C++ at all.  This binding is now known as the atf-c library.
     52 
     53 * Renamed the C++ binding to atf-c++ for consistency with the new atf-c.
     54 
     55 * Renamed the POSIX shell binding to atf-sh for consistency with the new
     56   atf-c and atf-c++.
     57 
     58 * Added a -w flag to test programs through which it is possible to specify
     59   the work directory to be used.  This was possible in prior releases by
     60   defining the workdir configuration variable (-v workdir=...), but was a
     61   conceptually incorrect mechanism.
     62 
     63 * Test programs now preserve the execution order of test cases when they
     64   are given in the command line.  Even those mentioned more than once are
     65   executed multiple times to comply with the user's requests.
     66 
     67 
     68 Version 0.4
     69 ===========
     70 
     71 Release date: February 4th, 2008
     72 Status:       Experimental
     73 
     74 Changes:
     75 
     76 * Added two new manual pages, atf-c++-api and atf-sh-api, describing the
     77   C++ and POSIX shell interfaces used to write test programs.
     78 
     79 * Added a pkg-config file, useful to get the flags to build against the
     80   C++ library or to easily detect the presence of ATF.
     81 
     82 * Added a way for test cases to require a specific architecture and/or
     83   machine type through the new 'require.arch' and 'require.machine'
     84   meta-data properties, respectively.
     85 
     86 * Added the 'timeout' property to test cases, useful to set an upper-bound
     87   limit for the test's run time and thus prevent global test program stalls
     88   due to the test case's misbehavior.
     89 
     90 * Added the atf-exec(1) internal utility, used to execute a command after
     91   changing the process group it belongs to.
     92 
     93 * Added the atf-killpg(1) internal utility, used to kill process groups.
     94 
     95 * Multiple portability fixes.  Of special interest, full support for SunOS
     96   (Solaris Express Developer Edition 2007/09) using the Sun Studio 12 C++
     97   compiler.
     98 
     99 * Fixed a serious bug that prevented atf-run(1) from working at all under
    100   Fedora 8 x86_64.  Due to the nature of the bug, other platforms were
    101   likely affected too.
    102 
    103 
    104 Version 0.3
    105 ===========
    106 
    107 Release date: November 11th, 2007
    108 Status:       Experimental
    109 
    110 Changes:
    111 
    112 * Added XML output support to atf-report.  This is accompanied by a DTD for
    113   the format's structure and sample XSLT/CSS files to post-process this
    114   output and convert it to a plain HTML report.
    115 
    116 * Changed atf-run to add system information to the report it generates.
    117   This is currently used by atf-report's XML output only, and is later
    118   printed in the HTML reports in a nice and useful summary table.  The user
    119   and system administrator are allowed to tune this feature by means of
    120   hooks.
    121 
    122 * Removed the test cases' 'isolated' property.  This was intended to avoid
    123   touching the file system at all when running the related test case, but
    124   this has not been true for a long while: some control files are
    125   unconditionally required for several purposes, and we cannot easily get
    126   rid of them.  This way we remove several critical and delicate pieces of
    127   code.
    128 
    129 * Improved atf-report's CSV output format to include information about
    130   test programs too.
    131 
    132 * Fixed the tests that used atf-compile to not require this tool as a
    133   helper.  Avoids systems without build-time utilities to skip many tests
    134   that could otherwise be run.  (E.g. NetBSD without the comp.tgz set
    135   installed.)
    136 
    137 * Many general cleanups: Fixed many pieces of code marked as ugly and/or
    138   incomplete.
    139 
    140 
    141 Version 0.2
    142 ===========
    143 
    144 Release date: September 20th, 2007
    145 Status:       Experimental
    146 
    147 Changes:
    148 
    149 * Test cases now get a known umask on entry.
    150 
    151 * atf-run now detects many unexpected failures caused by test programs
    152   and reports them as bogus tests.  atf-report is able to handle these
    153   new errors and nicely reports them to the user.
    154 
    155 * All the data formats read and written by the tools have been documented
    156   and cleaned up.  These include those grammars that define how the
    157   different components communicate with each other as well as the format
    158   of files written by the developers and users: the Atffiles and the
    159   configuration files.
    160 
    161 * Added the atf-version tool, a utility that displays information about the
    162   currently installed version of ATF.
    163 
    164 * Test cases can now define an optional cleanup routine to undo their
    165   actions regardless of their exit status.
    166 
    167 * atf-report now summarizes the list of failed (bogus) test programs when
    168   using the ticker output format.
    169 
    170 * Test programs now capture some termination signals and clean up any
    171   temporary files before exiting the program.
    172 
    173 * Multiple bug fixes and improvements all around.
    174 
    175 
    176 Version 0.1
    177 ===========
    178 
    179 Release date: August 20th, 2007
    180 Status:       Experimental
    181 
    182 Changes:
    183 
    184 * First public version.  This was released coinciding with the end of the
    185   Google Summer of Code 2007 program.
    186 
    187 
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