[Solar-talk] Solar Testing via external test library

[Travis Swicegood]

Howdy all,

I've talked with Paul a bit about this and now I want to get the general 
consensus from everyone else.  The last few days I've spent a bit of 
time looking over the Solar_Test code.  From a testing standpoint, 
there's one large flaw in it.  It is coupled, and relies on, the code 
it's testing in order to work.  Because Solar_Test relies explicitly on 
the Solar class to handle it's loading, etc., testing becomes much harder.

Also, there are large portions of the Solar_Test framework right now 
that are untested.  In looking over some of the solutions, we come close 
to having a full blown xUnit implementation inside Solar.  While there 
can never be too many testing frameworks out there, the KISS principle 
makes me think adopting one of two other xUnit testing would be the most 
pragmatic route.  The two testing frameworks we have available are 
SimpleTest and phpUnit2.  Of course, I'm partial to SimpleTest because 
I'm on the team there. :-)

The downside to the external testing library is that Solar is now not 
completely self-contained or we throw another package into a Solar 
distribution.  I'm not sure having the testing framework external to 
Solar bothers me.  I would prefer to have a testing framework that's 
completely tested and have to download that in addition to Solar when/if 
I need to worry about testing Solar in a new environment or for an 
upgrade.  This actually isn't much of a hassle for me, however, because 
I always have SimpleTest in the includes path.


So...  I guess here's the question.  What does everyone (or anyone?) 
think about using an external testing library to handle the tests in 
Solar?  I can write up a pretty quick scaffolding to handle tests in 
SimpleTest for Solar and get a patch out to the list if anyone's 
interested.  The was the test directory is structured right now, I could 
just add a tests/simpletest/ directory to contain the tests and start 
working from there alongside the existing tests and see where that gets us.

Thoughts?  Comments?

-Travis