NetBSD/dist/atf

Automated Testing Framework (atf)
Copyright (c) 2007 The NetBSD Foundation, Inc.
All rights reserved.


Introduction
============

The Automated Testing Framework (ATF) is a collection of libraries and
utilities designed to ease unattended application testing in the hands of
developers and end users of a specific piece of software.

As regards developers, ATF provides the necessary means to easily create
test suites composed of multiple test programs, which in turn are a
collection of test cases.  It also attempts to simplify the debugging of
problems when these test cases detect an error by providing as much
information as possible about the failure.

As regards users, it simplifies the process of running the test suites and,
in special, encourages end users to run them often: they do not need to
have source trees around nor any other development tools installed to be
able to certify that a given piece of software works on their machine as
advertised.


Configuration flags
===================

This section describes the non-standard flags added to the 'configure'
script.

* Variable: ATF_CONFSUBDIR
  Possible values: empty, a relative path.
  Default: atf.

  Specifies the subdirectory of the configuration directory (given by the
  --sysconfdir argument) under which ATF will search for its configuration
  files.

* Variable: ATF_WORKDIR
  Possible values: empty, an absolute path.
  Default: /tmp or /var/tmp, depending on availability.

  Specifies the directory that ATF will use to place its temporary files
  and work directories for test cases.  This is just a default and can
  be overriden at run time.

* Flag: --enable-developer
  Possible values: yes, no
  Default: Depends on the version number.  Stable versions define this
           to 'no' while all others have it set to 'yes'.

  Enables several features useful for development, such as the inclusion
  of debugging symbols in all objects or the enabling of warnings during
  compilation.

* Flag: --enable-unstable-shared
  Possible values: yes, no
  Default: no.

  Forces the building of shared libraries in addition to static ones.
  The build of shared libraries is currently disabled because their ABIs
  and APIs are unstable and subject to change.  This flag is provided for
  development purposes only and will be removed once the libraries are
  stable enough.


Post-installation steps
=======================

After installing ATF, you have to register the DTDs it provides into the
system-wide XML catalog.  See the comments at the top of the files in
${datadir}/share/xml/atf to see the correct public identifiers.  This
directory will typically be /usr/local/share/xml/atf or /usr/share/xml/atf.
Failure to do so will lead to further errors when processing the XML
files generated by atf-report.


Tools used to generate this distfile
====================================

* GNU autoconf 2.61
* GNU automake 1.10
* GNU libtool 1.5.22 (1.1220.2.365 2005/12/18 22:14:06)


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