New regression test driver

[Werner Koch]

Hi!

Justus started to work on a new regression test system for GnuPG.
Although the old system works nicely it has one one major problem: We
can't run the regression tests on the target platform if we are
cross-compiling.  In particular for Windows this is a major drawback
because we can only do manual tests.

The old test system is a pure Unix one and requires a POSIX shell.  Such
a shell is not easily available on Windows and the rest of the test
framework is also not easy to port to Windows (or other target
platforms).  So instead of writing a Bourne shell for Windows we came up
with the idea to use something simpler: A Scheme interpreter is much
easy to do than a shell and chaning the existing tests to Scheme is
doable [1].

We do not want a full fledged Scheme system but the simplest thing we
can use - speed is not an issue here.  Thus gpgscm is based in
TinySCHEME (~7000 lines of C code).  The GnuPG branch justus/scm-3 has
the current code with all tests converted to Scheme.  This basically
works except that the output needs some cleanup.  Some of the tests may
now also be run on Windows and we are working to get the other tests
running there.  The final goal is that a user should be able to run the
regression tests on the target platform without installing extra tools.

This test driver is now limited to GnuPG but our other libraries and
tools may also benefit from a portable way of running the tests.  The
libraries mostly use test programs written in C and are run using the
standard automake generated driver.  Those test programs themself are
runable on the target platform but they miss the framework to run the
entire suite on the target platform.

The question is whether to move the new test framework (gpgscm and the
supporting Scheme code) from GnuPG to Libgpg-error.  Libgpg-error is
anyway a build dependency for all our software and thus it would the
logical place for shared code.



Shalom-Salam,

   Werner


[1] Before you ask: No, we don't want to re-write GnuPG in Scheme.

-- 
Die Gedanken sind frei.  Ausnahmen regelt ein Bundesgesetz.
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