2009/10/8 Tobias C. Rittweiler tcr@freebits.de:
To me, the most interesting advantage that I see in ASDF providing a test operation, is that it should allow for automatic testing of arbitrary software packages.
I do not see how providing a stream argument is relevant to that. Or do you propose that people should /parse/ a test framework's output?
I mostly agree with this.
If you are running your own tests, (TEST-SYSTEM :FOO) is not a huge improvement over (LOAD-SYSTEM :FOO-TESTS) + (FOO-TESTS:RUN-FOO-TESTS), or whatever the call to run your tests is.
It's interesting for running tests set up by other people, in which case the failure behaviour should be unambigous -- be it error-on-failure, an object with a PRINT-OBJECT method that makes its meaning obvious, or whatever. Output during the operation does not qualify as unambiguous to me, particularly since I might be redirecting output...
That said, I don't see the ability to capture test output as contrary to this, just orthogonal.
Cheers,
-- Nikodemus