A new test framework: request for comments and testing

[Bernhard Reiter]

Am Mittwoch, 4. Mai 2016 15:28:44 schrieb Werner Koch:
> On Wed,  4 May 2016 09:38, bernhard at intevation.de said:
> > and I share that concern of a higher barrier.
>
> Not really; only for those who are used to write tests for GnuPG - not
> that many ;-)

The smiley indicates that you know 
that I mean new potential test writers 
compared to the language choice. Right now many will have the learn TinyScheme
or at least the details of TinyScheme compared to other scheme schemes. 
(SCNR). You are restating the problem.

> > * No good documentation, no tutorial.
>
> The Wizard Book (SICP) is an excellent tutorial and generations of
> hackers have grown up with it.

Okay, it is online here https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/,
but sorry this is not a modern tutorial nor a good documentation 
of TinyScheme.

> > * Small community, often not well maintained.
>
> The Scheme community small - my experience is different (see above)

I am refering to TinyScheme in particular, I know that there is a significant 
community in Scheme dialects. However when writing tests I will probably rely
on some of the finer details of this particular implementation.

> > * Lacking functions and libraries.
>
> Right, I want the test framework to be part of GnuPG proper and not rely
> on some external stuff.  We do not need more than what we can expect on
> a standard pre-POSIX Unix system.
>
> > So why not using a small-footprint interpreter for a more popular
> > language? Lua may be a candidate.
>
> Yet another fashionable language - too large.

Created 1993, from https://www.lua.org/about.html
//The tarball for Lua 5.3.2, which contains source code and documentation, 
takes 282K compressed and 1.1M uncompressed. The source contains around 24000 
lines of C. Under 64-bit Linux, the Lua interpreter built with all standard 
Lua libraries takes 245K and the Lua library takes 419K. //

Compare this to TinyScheme, to be fair I include the reg exp and date 
extensions:
  54k Mai  4 15:56 re-1.3.tar.gz
  62k Mai  4 09:00 tinyscheme-1.41.tar.gz
  8,5k Mai  4 15:55 tsx-1.1.tgz
okay, that is ~125k, half the size of the lua tarball.
sloccount gives me almost 10k lines of code, 
so lua is only about a factor of 1.4 as large as TinyScheme.

> > Personally I would not mind using a larger popular language for testing,
> > like Python. To me clarity and approachability of the language would be
> > more
>
> We considered to use Guile as a full fledged Scheme system but for
> obvious reasons we can't include it in GnuPG.

You mean because guile-2.0.11.tar.gz is 7.3 MiByte large?
Yes, that is ~25 times as large as lua.
Or because it it too young and fasionable (created 1995)?
:)

> > It would be cool to have a wiki.gnupg.org page with instructions how
> > to test this.
>
> "make check" as always.

Doing an example command session, including the git checkout and separation 
against potential existing gnupg installations will really enable some more 
testers.

-- 
www.intevation.de/~bernhard   +49 541 33 508 3-3
Intevation GmbH, Osnabrück, DE; Amtsgericht Osnabrück, HRB 18998
Geschäftsführer Frank Koormann, Bernhard Reiter, Dr. Jan-Oliver Wagner
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