Automated Testing Framework

The ATF_REQUIRE_THROW_RE and ATF_REQUIRE_MATCH macros have been added to the atf-c++ library. The default timeout for test cases has been reduced for speedier execution of faulty test suites. The use.fs property has been deprecated. New functions have been added to atf-c to simplify querying boolean and integer variables. Lastly, atf-run has been changed to automatically drop privileges for tests that cannot run as root.

For consistency with the C binding, the ATF_CHECK macros in the C++ binding have been renamed to ATF_REQUIRE. Lots of implementation details have been removed from the public APIs. The shell binding now enables "set -e" by default to catch programming mistakes in test cases. Lastly, there have been some miscellaneous bug and portability fixes.

The major change in this release was the addition of expected failures to test cases, which provides a mechanism to add tests for known bugs and get notifications when these get fixed. Additionally, there were new feature additions such as new macros to test for errno values and new checks for the output of command-line tools. At last, lots of obsolete/unnecessary code was removed and many simplifications to the source tree were introduced for easier maintenance of releases.

Support for build-time tests (a.k.a. running the compiler) was added to the C and C++ bindings. The code was refactored to provide a better interface for child-process management, which helps the change above. All the distribution-specific documents were converted to XML to allow the generation of online versions. Many other internal cleanups and fixes were made.

The atf-check tool has been added, which executes a given command and checks its exit code and output against pre-specified values. This is mostly used internally by the shell interface. A new set of macros, ATF_REQUIRE_*, has been added to the C interface to signal fatal errors, while the old ones (ATF_CHECK_*) now only signal non-fatal errors. There are several other internal changes to make test case timeout control more robust, and multiple optimizations all around the code (especially in the shell code).