1 Major changes between releases Automated Testing Framework
2 ===========================================================================
5 Changes in version 0.18
6 ***********************
8 Experimental version released on November 16th, 2013.
10 * Issue 45: Added require.memory support in atf-run for FreeBSD.
12 * Fixed an issue with the handling of cin with libc++.
14 * Issue 64: Fixed various mandoc formatting warnings.
16 * NetBSD PR bin/48284: Made atf-check flush its progress message to
17 stdout so that an interrupted test case always shows the last message
20 * NetBSD PR bin/48285: Fixed atf_check examples in atf-sh-api(3).
23 Changes in version 0.17
24 ***********************
26 Experimental version released on February 14th, 2013.
28 * Added the atf_utils_cat_file, atf_utils_compare_file,
29 atf_utils_copy_file, atf_utils_create_file, atf_utils_file_exists,
30 atf_utils_fork, atf_utils_grep_file, atf_utils_grep_string,
31 atf_utils_readline, atf_utils_redirect and atf_utils_wait utility
32 functions to atf-c-api. Documented the already-public
33 atf_utils_free_charpp function.
35 * Added the cat_file, compare_file, copy_file, create_file, file_exists,
36 fork, grep_collection, grep_file, grep_string, redirect and wait
37 functions to the atf::utils namespace of atf-c++-api. These are
38 wrappers around the same functions added to the atf-c-api library.
40 * Added the ATF_CHECK_MATCH, ATF_CHECK_MATCH_MSG, ATF_REQUIRE_MATCH and
41 ATF_REQUIRE_MATCH_MSG macros to atf-c to simplify the validation of a
42 string against a regular expression.
44 * Miscellaneous fixes for manpage typos and compilation problems with
47 * Added caching of the results of those configure tests that rely on
48 executing a test program. This should help crossbuild systems by
49 providing a mechanism to pre-specify what the results should be.
51 * PR bin/45690: Make atf-report convert any non-printable characters to
52 a plain-text representation (matching their corresponding hexadecimal
53 entities) in XML output files. This is to prevent the output of test
54 cases from breaking xsltproc later.
57 Changes in version 0.16
58 ***********************
60 Experimental version released on July 10th, 2012.
62 * Added a --enable-tools flag to configure to request the build of the
63 deprecated ATF tools, whose build is now disabled by default. In order
64 to continue running tests, you should migrate to Kyua instead of enabling
65 the build of the deprecated tools. The kyua-atf-compat package provides
66 transitional compatibility versions of atf-run and atf-report built on
69 * Tweaked the ATF_TEST_CASE macro of atf-c++ so that the compiler can
70 detect defined but unused test cases.
72 * PR bin/45859: Fixed some XSLT bugs that resulted in the tc-time and
73 tp-time XML tags leaking into the generated HTML file. Also improved
74 the CSS file slightly to correct alignment and color issues with the
77 * Optimized atf-c++/macros.hpp so that GNU G++ consumes less memory during
78 compilation with GNU G++.
80 * Flipped the default to building shared libraries for atf-c and atf-c++,
81 and started versioning them. As a side-effect, this removes the
82 --enable-unstable-shared flag from configure that appears to not work any
83 more (under NetBSD). Additionally, some distributions require the use of
84 shared libraries for proper dependency tracking (e.g. Fedora), so it is
85 better if we do the right versioning upstream.
87 * Project hosting moved from an adhoc solution (custom web site and
88 Monotone repository) to Google Code (standard wiki and Git). ATF now
89 lives in a subcomponent of the Kyua project.
92 Changes in version 0.15
93 ***********************
95 Experimental version released on January 16th, 2012.
97 * Respect stdin in atf-check. The previous release silenced stdin for any
98 processes spawned by atf, not only test programs, which caused breakage
99 in tests that pipe data through atf-check.
101 * Performance improvements to atf-sh.
103 * Enabled detection of unused parameters and variables in the code and
106 * Changed the behavior of "developer mode". Compiler warnings are now
107 enabled unconditionally regardless of whether we are in developer mode or
108 not; developer mode is now only used to perform strict warning checks and
109 to enable assertions. Additionally, developer mode is now only
110 automatically enabled when building from the repository, not for formal
113 * Added new Autoconf M4 macros (ATF_ARG_WITH, ATF_CHECK_C and
114 ATF_CHECK_CXX) to provide a consistent way of defining a --with-arg flag
115 in configure scripts and detecting the presence of any of the ATF
116 bindings. Note that ATF_CHECK_SH was already introduced in 0.14, but it
117 has now been modified to also honor --with-atf if instantiated.
119 * Added timing support to atf-run / atf-report.
121 * Added support for a 'require.memory' property, to specify the minimum
122 amount of physical memory needed by the test case to yield valid results.
124 * PR bin/45690: Force an ISO-8859-1 encoding in the XML files generated by
125 atf-report so that invalid data in the output of test cases does not
129 Changes in version 0.14
130 ***********************
132 Experimental version released on June 14th, 2011.
134 * Added a pkg-config file for atf-sh and an aclocal file to ease the
135 detection of atf-sh from autoconf scripts.
137 * Made the default test case body defined by atf_sh fail. This is to
138 ensure that test cases are properly defined in test programs and helps
139 in catching typos in the names of the body functions.
141 * PR bin/44882: Made atf-run connect the stdin of test cases to /dev/zero.
142 This provides more consistent results with "normal" execution (in
143 particular, when tests are executed detached from a terminal).
145 * Made atf-run hardcode TZ=UTC for test cases. It used to undefine TZ, but
146 that does not take into account that libc determines the current timezone
147 from a configuration file.
149 * All test programs will now print a warning when they are not run through
150 atf-run(1) stating that this is unsupported and may deliver incorrect
153 * Added support for the 'require.files' test-case property. This allows
154 test cases to specify installed files that must be present for the test
158 Changes in version 0.13
159 ***********************
161 Experimental version released on March 31st, 2011.
163 This is the first release after the creation of the Kyua project, a more
164 modular and reliable replacement for ATF. From now on, ATF will change to
165 accomodate the transition to this new codebase, but ATF will still continue
166 to see development in the short/medium term. Check out the project page at
167 http://code.google.com/p/kyua/ for more details.
169 The changes in this release are:
171 * Added support to run the tests with the Kyua runtime engine (kyua-cli), a
172 new package that aims to replace atf-run and atf-report. The ATF tests
173 can be run with the new system by issuing a 'make installcheck-kyua' from
174 the top-level directory of the project (assuming the 'kyua' binary is
175 available during the configuration stage of ATF).
177 * atf-run and atf-report are now in maintenance mode (but *not* deprecated
178 yet!). Kyua already implements a new, much more reliable runtime engine
179 that provides similar features to these tools. That said, it is not
180 complete yet so all development efforts should go towards it.
182 * If GDB is installed, atf-run dumps the stack trace of crashing test
183 programs in an attempt to aid debugging. Contributed by Antti Kantee.
185 * Reverted default timeout change in previous release and reset its value
186 to 5 minutes. This was causing several issues, specially when running
187 the existing NetBSD test suite in qemu.
189 * Fixed the 'match' output checker in atf-check to properly validate the
190 last line of a file even if it does not have a newline.
192 * Added the ATF_REQUIRE_IN and ATF_REQUIRE_NOT_IN macros to atf-c++ to
193 check for the presence (or lack thereof) of an element in a collection.
195 * PR bin/44176: Fixed a race condition in atf-run that would crash atf-run
196 when the cleanup of a test case triggered asynchronous modifications to
197 its work directory (e.g. killing a daemon process that cleans up a pid
198 file in the work directory).
200 * PR bin/44301: Fixed the sample XSLT file to report bogus test programs
201 instead of just listing them as having 0 test cases.
204 Changes in version 0.12
205 ***********************
207 Experimental version released on November 7th, 2010.
209 * Added the ATF_REQUIRE_THROW_RE to atf-c++, which is the same as
210 ATF_REQUIRE_THROW but allows checking for the validity of the exception's
211 error message by means of a regular expression.
213 * Added the ATF_REQUIRE_MATCH to atf-c++, which allows checking for a
214 regular expression match in a string.
216 * Changed the default timeout for test cases from 5 minutes to 30 seconds.
217 30 seconds is long enough for virtually all tests to complete, and 5
218 minutes is a way too long pause in a test suite where a single test case
221 * Deprecated the use.fs property. While this seemed like a good idea in
222 the first place to impose more control on what test cases can do, it
223 turns out to be bad. First, use.fs=false prevents bogus test cases
224 from dumping core so after-the-fact debugging is harder. Second,
225 supporting use.fs adds a lot of unnecessary complexity. atf-run will
226 now ignore any value provided to use.fs and will allow test cases to
227 freely access the file system if they wish to.
229 * Added the atf_tc_get_config_var_as_{bool,long}{,_wd} functions to the atf-c
230 library. The 'text' module became private in 0.11 but was being used
231 externally to simplify the parsing of configuration variables.
233 * Made atf-run recognize the 'unprivileged-user' configuration variable
234 and automatically drop root privileges when a test case sets
235 require.user=unprivileged. Note that this is, by no means, done for
236 security purposes; this is just for user convenience; tests should, in
237 general, not be blindly run as root in the first place.
240 Changes in version 0.11
241 ***********************
243 Experimental version released on October 20th, 2010.
245 * The ATF_CHECK* macros in atf-c++ were renamed to ATF_REQUIRE* to match
246 their counterparts in atf-c.
248 * Clearly separated the modules in atf-c that are supposed to be public
249 from those that are implementation details. The header files for the
250 internal modules are not installed any more.
252 * Made the atf-check tool private. It is only required by atf-sh and being
253 public has the danger of causing confusion. Also, making it private
254 simplifies the public API of atf.
256 * Changed atf-sh to enable per-command error checking (set -e) by default.
257 This catches many cases in which a test case is broken but it is not
258 reported as such because execution continues.
260 * Fixed the XSTL and CSS stylesheets to support expected failures.
263 Changes in version 0.10
264 ***********************
266 Experimental version released on July 2nd, 2010.
268 Miscellaneous features
270 * Added expected failures support to test cases and atf-run. These
271 include, for example, expected clean exits, expected reception of fatal
272 signals, expected timeouts and expected errors in condition checks.
273 These statuses can be used to denote test cases that are known to fail
274 due to a bug in the code they are testing. atf-report reports these
275 tests separately but they do not count towards the failed test cases
278 * Added the ATF_CHECK_ERRNO and ATF_REQUIRE_ERRNO to the C library to
279 allow easy checking of call failures that update errno.
281 * Added the has.cleanup meta-data property to test caes that specifies
282 whether the test case has a cleanup routine or not; its value is
283 automatically set. This property is read by atf-run to know if it has to
284 run the cleanup routine; skipping this run for every test case
285 significantly speeds up the run time of test suites.
287 * Reversed the order of the ATF_CHECK_THROW macro in the C++ binding to
288 take the expected exception as the first argument and the statement to
289 execute as the second argument.
293 * Changed atf-check to support negating the status and output checks by
294 prefixing them with not- and added support to specify multiple checkers
295 for stdout and stderr, not only one.
297 * Added the match output checker to atf-check to look for regular
298 expressions in the stdout and stderr of commands.
300 * Modified the exit checks in atf-check to support checking for the
301 reception of signals.
303 Code simplifications and cleanups
305 * Removed usage messages from test programs to simplify the
306 implementation of every binding by a significant amount. They just now
307 refer the user to the appropriate manual page and do not attempt to wrap
308 lines on terminal boundaries. Test programs are not supposed to be run
309 by users directly so this minor interface regression is not important.
311 * Removed the atf-format internal utility, which is unused after the
312 change documented above.
314 * Removed the atf-cleanup internal utility. It has been unused since the
315 test case isolation was moved to atf-run in 0.8
317 * Splitted the Makefile.am into smaller files for easier maintenance and
318 dropped the use of M4. Only affects users building from the repository
321 * Intermixed tests with the source files in the source tree to provide
322 them more visibility and easier access. The tests directory is gone from
323 the source tree and tests are now suffixed by _test, not prefixed by t_.
325 * Simplifications to the atf-c library: removed the io, tcr and ui
326 modules as they had become unnecessary after all simplifications
327 introduced since the 0.8 release.
329 * Removed the application/X-atf-tcr format introduced in 0.8 release.
330 Tests now print a much simplified format that is easy to parse and nicer
331 to read by end users. As a side effect, the default for test cases is
332 now to print their results to stdout unless otherwise stated by providing
335 * Removed XML distribution documents and replaced them with plain-text
336 documents. They provided little value and introduced a lot of complexity
339 * Simplified the output of atf-version by not attempting to print a
340 revision number when building form a distfile. Makes the build system
344 Changes in version 0.9
345 **********************
347 Experimental version released on June 3rd, 2010.
349 * Added atf-sh, an interpreter to process test programs written using
350 the shell API. This is not really a shell interpreter by itself though:
351 it is just a wrapper around the system shell that eases the loading of
352 the necessary ATF libraries.
354 * Removed atf-compile in favour of atf-sh.
356 * Added the use.fs metadata property to test case, which is used to
357 specify which test cases require file system access. This is to
358 highlight dependencies on external resources more clearly and to speed up
359 the execution of test suites by skipping the creation of many unnecessary
362 * Fixed test programs to get a sane default value for their source
363 directory. This means that it should not be necessary any more to pass
364 -s when running test programs that do not live in the current directory.
366 * Defining test case headers became optional. This is trivial to achieve
367 in shell-based tests but a bit ugly in C and C++. In C, use the new
368 ATF_TC_WITHOUT_HEAD macro to define the test case, and in C++ use
369 ATF_TEST_CASE_WITHOUT_HEAD.
372 Changes in version 0.8
373 **********************
375 Experimental version released on May 7th, 2010.
377 * Test programs no longer run several test cases in a row. The execution
378 of a test program now requires a test case name, and that single test
379 case is executed. To execute several test cases, use the atf-run utility
382 * Test programs no longer fork a subprocess to isolate the execution of
383 test cases. They run the test case code in-process, and a crash of the
384 test case will result in a crash of the test program. This is to ease
385 debugging of faulty test cases.
387 * Test programs no longer isolate their test cases. This means that they
388 will not create temporary directories nor sanitize the environment any
389 more. Yes: running a test case that depends on system state by hand will
390 most likely yield different results depending on where (machine,
391 directory, user environment, etc.) it is run. Isolation has been moved
394 * Test programs no longer print a cryptic format (application/X-atf-tcs)
395 on a special file channel. They can now print whatever they want on the
396 screen. Because test programs can now only run one test case every time,
397 providing controlled output is not necessary any more.
399 * Test programs no longer write their status into a special file
400 descriptor. Instead, they create a file with the results, which is later
401 parsed by atf-run. This changes the semantics of the -r flag.
403 * atf-run has been adjusted to perform the test case isolation. As a
404 result, there is now a single canonical place that implements the
405 isolation of test caes. In previous releases, the three language
406 bindings (C, C++ and shell) had to be kept in sync with each other (read:
407 not a nice thing to do at all). As a side effect of this change, writing
408 bindings for other languages will be much, much easier from now on.
410 * atf-run forks test programs on a test case basis, instead of on a test
411 program basis as it did before. This is to provide the test case
412 isolation that was before implemented by the test programs themselves.
414 * Removed the atf-exec tool. This was used to implement test case
415 isolation in atf-sh, but it is now unnecessary.
417 * It is now optional to define the descr meta-data property. It has been
418 proven to be mostly useless, because test cases often carry a descriptive
422 Changes in version 0.7
423 **********************
425 Experimental version released on December 22nd, 2009.
427 * Added build-time checks to atf-c and atf-c++. A binding for atf-sh
430 * Migrated all build-time checks for header files to proper ATF tests.
431 This demonstrates the use of the new feature described above.
433 * Added an internal API for child process management.
435 * Converted all plain-text distribution documents to a Docbook canonical
436 version, and include pre-generated plain text and HTML copies in the
439 * Simplified the contents of the Makefile.am by regenerating it from a
440 canonical Makefile.am.m4 source. As a side-effect, some dependency
441 specifications were fixed.
443 * Migrated all checks from the check target to installcheck, as these
444 require ATF to be installed.
446 * Fixed sign comparison mismatches triggered by the now-enabled
449 * Fixed many memory and object leaks.
452 Changes in version 0.6
453 **********************
455 Experimental version released on January 18th, 2009.
457 * Make atf-exec be able to kill its child process after a certain period
458 of time; this is controlled through the new -t option.
460 * Change atf-sh to use atf-exec's -t option to control the test case's
461 timeouts, instead of doing it internally. Same behavior as before, but
464 * atf-exec's -g option and atf-killpg are gone due to the previous
467 * Added the atf-check(1) tool, a program that executes a given command
468 and checks its exit code against a known value and allows the management
469 of stdout and stderr in multiple ways. This replaces the previous
470 atf_check function in the atf-sh library and exposes this functionality
471 to both atf-c and atf-c++.
473 * Added the ATF_REQUIRE family of macros to the C interface. These help
474 in checking for fatal test conditions. The old ATF_CHECK macros now
475 perform non-fatal checks only. I.e. by using ATF_CHECK, the test case
476 can now continue its execution and the failures will not be reported
477 until the end of the whole run.
479 * Extended the amount of ATF_CHECK_* C macros with new ones to provide
480 more features to the developer. These also have their corresponding
481 counterparts in the ATF_REQUIRE_* family. The new macros (listing the
482 suffixes only) are: _EQ (replaces _EQUAL), _EQ_MSG, _STREQ and
486 Changes in version 0.5
487 **********************
489 Experimental version released on May 1st, 2008.
491 * Clauses 3 and 4 of the BSD license used by the project were dropped.
492 All the code is now under a 2-clause BSD license compatible with the GNU
493 General Public License (GPL).
495 * Added a C-only binding so that binary test programs do not need to be
496 tied to C++ at all. This binding is now known as the atf-c library.
498 * Renamed the C++ binding to atf-c++ for consistency with the new atf-c.
500 * Renamed the POSIX shell binding to atf-sh for consistency with the new
503 * Added a -w flag to test programs through which it is possible to
504 specify the work directory to be used. This was possible in prior
505 releases by defining the workdir configuration variable (-v workdir=...),
506 but was a conceptually incorrect mechanism.
508 * Test programs now preserve the execution order of test cases when they
509 are given in the command line. Even those mentioned more than once are
510 executed multiple times to comply with the user's requests.
513 Changes in version 0.4
514 **********************
516 Experimental version released on February 4th, 2008.
518 * Added two new manual pages, atf-c++-api and atf-sh-api, describing the
519 C++ and POSIX shell interfaces used to write test programs.
521 * Added a pkg-config file, useful to get the flags to build against the
522 C++ library or to easily detect the presence of ATF.
524 * Added a way for test cases to require a specific architecture and/or
525 machine type through the new 'require.arch' and 'require.machine'
526 meta-data properties, respectively.
528 * Added the 'timeout' property to test cases, useful to set an
529 upper-bound limit for the test's run time and thus prevent global test
530 program stalls due to the test case's misbehavior.
532 * Added the atf-exec(1) internal utility, used to execute a command
533 after changing the process group it belongs to.
535 * Added the atf-killpg(1) internal utility, used to kill process groups.
537 * Multiple portability fixes. Of special interest, full support for
538 SunOS (Solaris Express Developer Edition 2007/09) using the Sun Studio 12
541 * Fixed a serious bug that prevented atf-run(1) from working at all
542 under Fedora 8 x86_64. Due to the nature of the bug, other platforms
543 were likely affected too.
546 Changes in version 0.3
547 **********************
549 Experimental version released on November 11th, 2007.
551 * Added XML output support to atf-report. This is accompanied by a DTD
552 for the format's structure and sample XSLT/CSS files to post-process this
553 output and convert it to a plain HTML report.
555 * Changed atf-run to add system information to the report it generates.
556 This is currently used by atf-report's XML output only, and is later
557 printed in the HTML reports in a nice and useful summary table. The user
558 and system administrator are allowed to tune this feature by means of
561 * Removed the test cases' 'isolated' property. This was intended to
562 avoid touching the file system at all when running the related test case,
563 but this has not been true for a long while: some control files are
564 unconditionally required for several purposes, and we cannot easily get
565 rid of them. This way we remove several critical and delicate pieces of
568 * Improved atf-report's CSV output format to include information about
571 * Fixed the tests that used atf-compile to not require this tool as a
572 helper. Avoids systems without build-time utilities to skip many tests
573 that could otherwise be run. (E.g. NetBSD without the comp.tgz set
576 * Many general cleanups: Fixed many pieces of code marked as ugly and/or
580 Changes in version 0.2
581 **********************
583 Experimental version released on September 20th, 2007.
585 * Test cases now get a known umask on entry.
587 * atf-run now detects many unexpected failures caused by test programs and
588 reports them as bogus tests. atf-report is able to handle these new
589 errors and nicely reports them to the user.
591 * All the data formats read and written by the tools have been
592 documented and cleaned up. These include those grammars that define how
593 the different components communicate with each other as well as the
594 format of files written by the developers and users: the Atffiles and the
597 * Added the atf-version tool, a utility that displays information about
598 the currently installed version of ATF.
600 * Test cases can now define an optional cleanup routine to undo their
601 actions regardless of their exit status.
603 * atf-report now summarizes the list of failed (bogus) test programs
604 when using the ticker output format.
606 * Test programs now capture some termination signals and clean up any
607 temporary files before exiting the program.
609 * Multiple bug fixes and improvements all around.
612 Changes in version 0.1
613 **********************
615 Experimental version released on August 20th, 2007.
617 * First public version. This was released coinciding with the end of the
618 Google Summer of Code 2007 program.
621 ===========================================================================
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