1 Major changes between releases Automated Testing Framework
2 ===========================================================================
5 Changes in version 0.20
6 ***********************
8 Experimental version released on February 7th, 2014.
10 This is the first release without the code for the deprecated tools. If
11 you require such code, please fetch a copy of the 0.19 release and extract
12 the 'tools' directory for your own consumption.
14 * Removed the deprecated tools. This includes atf-config, atf-report,
15 atf-run and atf-version.
18 Changes in version 0.19
19 ***********************
21 Experimental version released on February 7th, 2014.
23 This is the last release to bundle the code for the deprecated tools.
24 The next release will drop their code and will stop worrying about
25 backwards compatibility between the ATF libraries and what the old tools
26 may or may not support.
28 If you still require the old tools for some reason, grab a copy of the
29 'tools' directory now. The code in this directory is standalone and
30 does not depend on any internal details of atf-c++ any longer.
32 * Various fixes and improvements to support running as part of the FreeBSD
35 * Project hosting moved from Google Code (as a subproject of Kyua) to
36 GitHub (as a first-class project). The main reason for the change is
37 the suppression of binary downloads in Google Code on Jan 15th, 2014.
38 See https://github.com/jmmv/atf/
40 * Removed builtin help from atf-sh(1) and atf-check(1) for simplicity
41 reasons. In other words, their -h option is gone.
43 * Moved the code of the deprecated tools into a 'tools' directory and
44 completely decoupled their code from the internals of atf-c++. The
45 reason for this is to painlessly allow a third-party to maintain a
46 copy of these tools after we delete them because upcoming changes to
47 atf-c++ would break the stale tools.
50 Changes in version 0.18
51 ***********************
53 Experimental version released on November 16th, 2013.
55 * Issue 45: Added require.memory support in atf-run for FreeBSD.
57 * Fixed an issue with the handling of cin with libc++.
59 * Issue 64: Fixed various mandoc formatting warnings.
61 * NetBSD PR bin/48284: Made atf-check flush its progress message to
62 stdout so that an interrupted test case always shows the last message
65 * NetBSD PR bin/48285: Fixed atf_check examples in atf-sh-api(3).
68 Changes in version 0.17
69 ***********************
71 Experimental version released on February 14th, 2013.
73 * Added the atf_utils_cat_file, atf_utils_compare_file,
74 atf_utils_copy_file, atf_utils_create_file, atf_utils_file_exists,
75 atf_utils_fork, atf_utils_grep_file, atf_utils_grep_string,
76 atf_utils_readline, atf_utils_redirect and atf_utils_wait utility
77 functions to atf-c-api. Documented the already-public
78 atf_utils_free_charpp function.
80 * Added the cat_file, compare_file, copy_file, create_file, file_exists,
81 fork, grep_collection, grep_file, grep_string, redirect and wait
82 functions to the atf::utils namespace of atf-c++-api. These are
83 wrappers around the same functions added to the atf-c-api library.
85 * Added the ATF_CHECK_MATCH, ATF_CHECK_MATCH_MSG, ATF_REQUIRE_MATCH and
86 ATF_REQUIRE_MATCH_MSG macros to atf-c to simplify the validation of a
87 string against a regular expression.
89 * Miscellaneous fixes for manpage typos and compilation problems with
92 * Added caching of the results of those configure tests that rely on
93 executing a test program. This should help crossbuild systems by
94 providing a mechanism to pre-specify what the results should be.
96 * PR bin/45690: Make atf-report convert any non-printable characters to
97 a plain-text representation (matching their corresponding hexadecimal
98 entities) in XML output files. This is to prevent the output of test
99 cases from breaking xsltproc later.
102 Changes in version 0.16
103 ***********************
105 Experimental version released on July 10th, 2012.
107 * Added a --enable-tools flag to configure to request the build of the
108 deprecated ATF tools, whose build is now disabled by default. In order
109 to continue running tests, you should migrate to Kyua instead of enabling
110 the build of the deprecated tools. The kyua-atf-compat package provides
111 transitional compatibility versions of atf-run and atf-report built on
114 * Tweaked the ATF_TEST_CASE macro of atf-c++ so that the compiler can
115 detect defined but unused test cases.
117 * PR bin/45859: Fixed some XSLT bugs that resulted in the tc-time and
118 tp-time XML tags leaking into the generated HTML file. Also improved
119 the CSS file slightly to correct alignment and color issues with the
122 * Optimized atf-c++/macros.hpp so that GNU G++ consumes less memory during
123 compilation with GNU G++.
125 * Flipped the default to building shared libraries for atf-c and atf-c++,
126 and started versioning them. As a side-effect, this removes the
127 --enable-unstable-shared flag from configure that appears to not work any
128 more (under NetBSD). Additionally, some distributions require the use of
129 shared libraries for proper dependency tracking (e.g. Fedora), so it is
130 better if we do the right versioning upstream.
132 * Project hosting moved from an adhoc solution (custom web site and
133 Monotone repository) to Google Code (standard wiki and Git). ATF now
134 lives in a subcomponent of the Kyua project.
137 Changes in version 0.15
138 ***********************
140 Experimental version released on January 16th, 2012.
142 * Respect stdin in atf-check. The previous release silenced stdin for any
143 processes spawned by atf, not only test programs, which caused breakage
144 in tests that pipe data through atf-check.
146 * Performance improvements to atf-sh.
148 * Enabled detection of unused parameters and variables in the code and
151 * Changed the behavior of "developer mode". Compiler warnings are now
152 enabled unconditionally regardless of whether we are in developer mode or
153 not; developer mode is now only used to perform strict warning checks and
154 to enable assertions. Additionally, developer mode is now only
155 automatically enabled when building from the repository, not for formal
158 * Added new Autoconf M4 macros (ATF_ARG_WITH, ATF_CHECK_C and
159 ATF_CHECK_CXX) to provide a consistent way of defining a --with-arg flag
160 in configure scripts and detecting the presence of any of the ATF
161 bindings. Note that ATF_CHECK_SH was already introduced in 0.14, but it
162 has now been modified to also honor --with-atf if instantiated.
164 * Added timing support to atf-run / atf-report.
166 * Added support for a 'require.memory' property, to specify the minimum
167 amount of physical memory needed by the test case to yield valid results.
169 * PR bin/45690: Force an ISO-8859-1 encoding in the XML files generated by
170 atf-report so that invalid data in the output of test cases does not
174 Changes in version 0.14
175 ***********************
177 Experimental version released on June 14th, 2011.
179 * Added a pkg-config file for atf-sh and an aclocal file to ease the
180 detection of atf-sh from autoconf scripts.
182 * Made the default test case body defined by atf_sh fail. This is to
183 ensure that test cases are properly defined in test programs and helps
184 in catching typos in the names of the body functions.
186 * PR bin/44882: Made atf-run connect the stdin of test cases to /dev/zero.
187 This provides more consistent results with "normal" execution (in
188 particular, when tests are executed detached from a terminal).
190 * Made atf-run hardcode TZ=UTC for test cases. It used to undefine TZ, but
191 that does not take into account that libc determines the current timezone
192 from a configuration file.
194 * All test programs will now print a warning when they are not run through
195 atf-run(1) stating that this is unsupported and may deliver incorrect
198 * Added support for the 'require.files' test-case property. This allows
199 test cases to specify installed files that must be present for the test
203 Changes in version 0.13
204 ***********************
206 Experimental version released on March 31st, 2011.
208 This is the first release after the creation of the Kyua project, a more
209 modular and reliable replacement for ATF. From now on, ATF will change to
210 accomodate the transition to this new codebase, but ATF will still continue
211 to see development in the short/medium term. Check out the project page at
212 http://code.google.com/p/kyua/ for more details.
214 The changes in this release are:
216 * Added support to run the tests with the Kyua runtime engine (kyua-cli), a
217 new package that aims to replace atf-run and atf-report. The ATF tests
218 can be run with the new system by issuing a 'make installcheck-kyua' from
219 the top-level directory of the project (assuming the 'kyua' binary is
220 available during the configuration stage of ATF).
222 * atf-run and atf-report are now in maintenance mode (but *not* deprecated
223 yet!). Kyua already implements a new, much more reliable runtime engine
224 that provides similar features to these tools. That said, it is not
225 complete yet so all development efforts should go towards it.
227 * If GDB is installed, atf-run dumps the stack trace of crashing test
228 programs in an attempt to aid debugging. Contributed by Antti Kantee.
230 * Reverted default timeout change in previous release and reset its value
231 to 5 minutes. This was causing several issues, specially when running
232 the existing NetBSD test suite in qemu.
234 * Fixed the 'match' output checker in atf-check to properly validate the
235 last line of a file even if it does not have a newline.
237 * Added the ATF_REQUIRE_IN and ATF_REQUIRE_NOT_IN macros to atf-c++ to
238 check for the presence (or lack thereof) of an element in a collection.
240 * PR bin/44176: Fixed a race condition in atf-run that would crash atf-run
241 when the cleanup of a test case triggered asynchronous modifications to
242 its work directory (e.g. killing a daemon process that cleans up a pid
243 file in the work directory).
245 * PR bin/44301: Fixed the sample XSLT file to report bogus test programs
246 instead of just listing them as having 0 test cases.
249 Changes in version 0.12
250 ***********************
252 Experimental version released on November 7th, 2010.
254 * Added the ATF_REQUIRE_THROW_RE to atf-c++, which is the same as
255 ATF_REQUIRE_THROW but allows checking for the validity of the exception's
256 error message by means of a regular expression.
258 * Added the ATF_REQUIRE_MATCH to atf-c++, which allows checking for a
259 regular expression match in a string.
261 * Changed the default timeout for test cases from 5 minutes to 30 seconds.
262 30 seconds is long enough for virtually all tests to complete, and 5
263 minutes is a way too long pause in a test suite where a single test case
266 * Deprecated the use.fs property. While this seemed like a good idea in
267 the first place to impose more control on what test cases can do, it
268 turns out to be bad. First, use.fs=false prevents bogus test cases
269 from dumping core so after-the-fact debugging is harder. Second,
270 supporting use.fs adds a lot of unnecessary complexity. atf-run will
271 now ignore any value provided to use.fs and will allow test cases to
272 freely access the file system if they wish to.
274 * Added the atf_tc_get_config_var_as_{bool,long}{,_wd} functions to the atf-c
275 library. The 'text' module became private in 0.11 but was being used
276 externally to simplify the parsing of configuration variables.
278 * Made atf-run recognize the 'unprivileged-user' configuration variable
279 and automatically drop root privileges when a test case sets
280 require.user=unprivileged. Note that this is, by no means, done for
281 security purposes; this is just for user convenience; tests should, in
282 general, not be blindly run as root in the first place.
285 Changes in version 0.11
286 ***********************
288 Experimental version released on October 20th, 2010.
290 * The ATF_CHECK* macros in atf-c++ were renamed to ATF_REQUIRE* to match
291 their counterparts in atf-c.
293 * Clearly separated the modules in atf-c that are supposed to be public
294 from those that are implementation details. The header files for the
295 internal modules are not installed any more.
297 * Made the atf-check tool private. It is only required by atf-sh and being
298 public has the danger of causing confusion. Also, making it private
299 simplifies the public API of atf.
301 * Changed atf-sh to enable per-command error checking (set -e) by default.
302 This catches many cases in which a test case is broken but it is not
303 reported as such because execution continues.
305 * Fixed the XSTL and CSS stylesheets to support expected failures.
308 Changes in version 0.10
309 ***********************
311 Experimental version released on July 2nd, 2010.
313 Miscellaneous features
315 * Added expected failures support to test cases and atf-run. These
316 include, for example, expected clean exits, expected reception of fatal
317 signals, expected timeouts and expected errors in condition checks.
318 These statuses can be used to denote test cases that are known to fail
319 due to a bug in the code they are testing. atf-report reports these
320 tests separately but they do not count towards the failed test cases
323 * Added the ATF_CHECK_ERRNO and ATF_REQUIRE_ERRNO to the C library to
324 allow easy checking of call failures that update errno.
326 * Added the has.cleanup meta-data property to test caes that specifies
327 whether the test case has a cleanup routine or not; its value is
328 automatically set. This property is read by atf-run to know if it has to
329 run the cleanup routine; skipping this run for every test case
330 significantly speeds up the run time of test suites.
332 * Reversed the order of the ATF_CHECK_THROW macro in the C++ binding to
333 take the expected exception as the first argument and the statement to
334 execute as the second argument.
338 * Changed atf-check to support negating the status and output checks by
339 prefixing them with not- and added support to specify multiple checkers
340 for stdout and stderr, not only one.
342 * Added the match output checker to atf-check to look for regular
343 expressions in the stdout and stderr of commands.
345 * Modified the exit checks in atf-check to support checking for the
346 reception of signals.
348 Code simplifications and cleanups
350 * Removed usage messages from test programs to simplify the
351 implementation of every binding by a significant amount. They just now
352 refer the user to the appropriate manual page and do not attempt to wrap
353 lines on terminal boundaries. Test programs are not supposed to be run
354 by users directly so this minor interface regression is not important.
356 * Removed the atf-format internal utility, which is unused after the
357 change documented above.
359 * Removed the atf-cleanup internal utility. It has been unused since the
360 test case isolation was moved to atf-run in 0.8
362 * Splitted the Makefile.am into smaller files for easier maintenance and
363 dropped the use of M4. Only affects users building from the repository
366 * Intermixed tests with the source files in the source tree to provide
367 them more visibility and easier access. The tests directory is gone from
368 the source tree and tests are now suffixed by _test, not prefixed by t_.
370 * Simplifications to the atf-c library: removed the io, tcr and ui
371 modules as they had become unnecessary after all simplifications
372 introduced since the 0.8 release.
374 * Removed the application/X-atf-tcr format introduced in 0.8 release.
375 Tests now print a much simplified format that is easy to parse and nicer
376 to read by end users. As a side effect, the default for test cases is
377 now to print their results to stdout unless otherwise stated by providing
380 * Removed XML distribution documents and replaced them with plain-text
381 documents. They provided little value and introduced a lot of complexity
384 * Simplified the output of atf-version by not attempting to print a
385 revision number when building form a distfile. Makes the build system
389 Changes in version 0.9
390 **********************
392 Experimental version released on June 3rd, 2010.
394 * Added atf-sh, an interpreter to process test programs written using
395 the shell API. This is not really a shell interpreter by itself though:
396 it is just a wrapper around the system shell that eases the loading of
397 the necessary ATF libraries.
399 * Removed atf-compile in favour of atf-sh.
401 * Added the use.fs metadata property to test case, which is used to
402 specify which test cases require file system access. This is to
403 highlight dependencies on external resources more clearly and to speed up
404 the execution of test suites by skipping the creation of many unnecessary
407 * Fixed test programs to get a sane default value for their source
408 directory. This means that it should not be necessary any more to pass
409 -s when running test programs that do not live in the current directory.
411 * Defining test case headers became optional. This is trivial to achieve
412 in shell-based tests but a bit ugly in C and C++. In C, use the new
413 ATF_TC_WITHOUT_HEAD macro to define the test case, and in C++ use
414 ATF_TEST_CASE_WITHOUT_HEAD.
417 Changes in version 0.8
418 **********************
420 Experimental version released on May 7th, 2010.
422 * Test programs no longer run several test cases in a row. The execution
423 of a test program now requires a test case name, and that single test
424 case is executed. To execute several test cases, use the atf-run utility
427 * Test programs no longer fork a subprocess to isolate the execution of
428 test cases. They run the test case code in-process, and a crash of the
429 test case will result in a crash of the test program. This is to ease
430 debugging of faulty test cases.
432 * Test programs no longer isolate their test cases. This means that they
433 will not create temporary directories nor sanitize the environment any
434 more. Yes: running a test case that depends on system state by hand will
435 most likely yield different results depending on where (machine,
436 directory, user environment, etc.) it is run. Isolation has been moved
439 * Test programs no longer print a cryptic format (application/X-atf-tcs)
440 on a special file channel. They can now print whatever they want on the
441 screen. Because test programs can now only run one test case every time,
442 providing controlled output is not necessary any more.
444 * Test programs no longer write their status into a special file
445 descriptor. Instead, they create a file with the results, which is later
446 parsed by atf-run. This changes the semantics of the -r flag.
448 * atf-run has been adjusted to perform the test case isolation. As a
449 result, there is now a single canonical place that implements the
450 isolation of test caes. In previous releases, the three language
451 bindings (C, C++ and shell) had to be kept in sync with each other (read:
452 not a nice thing to do at all). As a side effect of this change, writing
453 bindings for other languages will be much, much easier from now on.
455 * atf-run forks test programs on a test case basis, instead of on a test
456 program basis as it did before. This is to provide the test case
457 isolation that was before implemented by the test programs themselves.
459 * Removed the atf-exec tool. This was used to implement test case
460 isolation in atf-sh, but it is now unnecessary.
462 * It is now optional to define the descr meta-data property. It has been
463 proven to be mostly useless, because test cases often carry a descriptive
467 Changes in version 0.7
468 **********************
470 Experimental version released on December 22nd, 2009.
472 * Added build-time checks to atf-c and atf-c++. A binding for atf-sh
475 * Migrated all build-time checks for header files to proper ATF tests.
476 This demonstrates the use of the new feature described above.
478 * Added an internal API for child process management.
480 * Converted all plain-text distribution documents to a Docbook canonical
481 version, and include pre-generated plain text and HTML copies in the
484 * Simplified the contents of the Makefile.am by regenerating it from a
485 canonical Makefile.am.m4 source. As a side-effect, some dependency
486 specifications were fixed.
488 * Migrated all checks from the check target to installcheck, as these
489 require ATF to be installed.
491 * Fixed sign comparison mismatches triggered by the now-enabled
494 * Fixed many memory and object leaks.
497 Changes in version 0.6
498 **********************
500 Experimental version released on January 18th, 2009.
502 * Make atf-exec be able to kill its child process after a certain period
503 of time; this is controlled through the new -t option.
505 * Change atf-sh to use atf-exec's -t option to control the test case's
506 timeouts, instead of doing it internally. Same behavior as before, but
509 * atf-exec's -g option and atf-killpg are gone due to the previous
512 * Added the atf-check(1) tool, a program that executes a given command
513 and checks its exit code against a known value and allows the management
514 of stdout and stderr in multiple ways. This replaces the previous
515 atf_check function in the atf-sh library and exposes this functionality
516 to both atf-c and atf-c++.
518 * Added the ATF_REQUIRE family of macros to the C interface. These help
519 in checking for fatal test conditions. The old ATF_CHECK macros now
520 perform non-fatal checks only. I.e. by using ATF_CHECK, the test case
521 can now continue its execution and the failures will not be reported
522 until the end of the whole run.
524 * Extended the amount of ATF_CHECK_* C macros with new ones to provide
525 more features to the developer. These also have their corresponding
526 counterparts in the ATF_REQUIRE_* family. The new macros (listing the
527 suffixes only) are: _EQ (replaces _EQUAL), _EQ_MSG, _STREQ and
531 Changes in version 0.5
532 **********************
534 Experimental version released on May 1st, 2008.
536 * Clauses 3 and 4 of the BSD license used by the project were dropped.
537 All the code is now under a 2-clause BSD license compatible with the GNU
538 General Public License (GPL).
540 * Added a C-only binding so that binary test programs do not need to be
541 tied to C++ at all. This binding is now known as the atf-c library.
543 * Renamed the C++ binding to atf-c++ for consistency with the new atf-c.
545 * Renamed the POSIX shell binding to atf-sh for consistency with the new
548 * Added a -w flag to test programs through which it is possible to
549 specify the work directory to be used. This was possible in prior
550 releases by defining the workdir configuration variable (-v workdir=...),
551 but was a conceptually incorrect mechanism.
553 * Test programs now preserve the execution order of test cases when they
554 are given in the command line. Even those mentioned more than once are
555 executed multiple times to comply with the user's requests.
558 Changes in version 0.4
559 **********************
561 Experimental version released on February 4th, 2008.
563 * Added two new manual pages, atf-c++-api and atf-sh-api, describing the
564 C++ and POSIX shell interfaces used to write test programs.
566 * Added a pkg-config file, useful to get the flags to build against the
567 C++ library or to easily detect the presence of ATF.
569 * Added a way for test cases to require a specific architecture and/or
570 machine type through the new 'require.arch' and 'require.machine'
571 meta-data properties, respectively.
573 * Added the 'timeout' property to test cases, useful to set an
574 upper-bound limit for the test's run time and thus prevent global test
575 program stalls due to the test case's misbehavior.
577 * Added the atf-exec(1) internal utility, used to execute a command
578 after changing the process group it belongs to.
580 * Added the atf-killpg(1) internal utility, used to kill process groups.
582 * Multiple portability fixes. Of special interest, full support for
583 SunOS (Solaris Express Developer Edition 2007/09) using the Sun Studio 12
586 * Fixed a serious bug that prevented atf-run(1) from working at all
587 under Fedora 8 x86_64. Due to the nature of the bug, other platforms
588 were likely affected too.
591 Changes in version 0.3
592 **********************
594 Experimental version released on November 11th, 2007.
596 * Added XML output support to atf-report. This is accompanied by a DTD
597 for the format's structure and sample XSLT/CSS files to post-process this
598 output and convert it to a plain HTML report.
600 * Changed atf-run to add system information to the report it generates.
601 This is currently used by atf-report's XML output only, and is later
602 printed in the HTML reports in a nice and useful summary table. The user
603 and system administrator are allowed to tune this feature by means of
606 * Removed the test cases' 'isolated' property. This was intended to
607 avoid touching the file system at all when running the related test case,
608 but this has not been true for a long while: some control files are
609 unconditionally required for several purposes, and we cannot easily get
610 rid of them. This way we remove several critical and delicate pieces of
613 * Improved atf-report's CSV output format to include information about
616 * Fixed the tests that used atf-compile to not require this tool as a
617 helper. Avoids systems without build-time utilities to skip many tests
618 that could otherwise be run. (E.g. NetBSD without the comp.tgz set
621 * Many general cleanups: Fixed many pieces of code marked as ugly and/or
625 Changes in version 0.2
626 **********************
628 Experimental version released on September 20th, 2007.
630 * Test cases now get a known umask on entry.
632 * atf-run now detects many unexpected failures caused by test programs and
633 reports them as bogus tests. atf-report is able to handle these new
634 errors and nicely reports them to the user.
636 * All the data formats read and written by the tools have been
637 documented and cleaned up. These include those grammars that define how
638 the different components communicate with each other as well as the
639 format of files written by the developers and users: the Atffiles and the
642 * Added the atf-version tool, a utility that displays information about
643 the currently installed version of ATF.
645 * Test cases can now define an optional cleanup routine to undo their
646 actions regardless of their exit status.
648 * atf-report now summarizes the list of failed (bogus) test programs
649 when using the ticker output format.
651 * Test programs now capture some termination signals and clean up any
652 temporary files before exiting the program.
654 * Multiple bug fixes and improvements all around.
657 Changes in version 0.1
658 **********************
660 Experimental version released on August 20th, 2007.
662 * First public version. This was released coinciding with the end of the
663 Google Summer of Code 2007 program.
666 ===========================================================================
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