Help Us With Test::Harness 3.0

[Ovid]

To get ready for a Test::Harness 3.0 beta (using TAP::Parser), we need to improve our docs and our code coverage. Patches very, very welcome. The system appears to be relatively stable and if you want to create patches directly against our repository, you can:

    svn checkout http://svn.hexten.net/tapx

You can also subscribe to the TAP-Parser dev mailing list.

When we feel comfortable with our test coverage and our docs, we'll put a beta out, to eventually be followed by a release candidate.

And now for some background. If you've been testing for a while, particularly if you're used to testing in other programming languages, you probably know that Test::Harness, while extremely useful, is also rather limited. It's difficult to extend TAP, very hard to override the handling of individual tests and slapping on alternate views has proved almost impossible. Shortly after Schwern posted a roadmap for creating a new harness, I've been working on TAP::Parser. With the core of the parser done and stable, Andy Armstrong took over lead development and Eric Wilhelm has also pitched in with some excellent bug fixes and tests.

Replacing Test::Harness with TAP::Parser already has the blessing of the the maintainers and Perl pumpkings and we think we're finally at the point to consider this, particularly since most of the bugs in the Test::Harness RT queue are fixed in TAP::Parser. What we really need now is for more people to download TAP::Parser and start using it. TAP::Parser comes with runtests (analogous to prove) and if all you do is use runtests instead of prove when you test, that would be a big help.

Our biggest concern is stability. This will affect many thousands of users, so we're highly unlikely to get too creative with this. We have plenty of plans for future work, but for now, we want to finally push this forward and give you the new Test::Harness 3.0. However, we'll consider any and all requests.

If you'll be at Vienna for this year's YAPC::EU, I'll be giving a talk about Test::Harness 3.0. Come see the talk and ask me what you can do to help!