Hi,
I think we've gotten to the point where we need to decide how we are
going to test plugins. We need to pick one of the frameworks, settle
on a pattern, and use that in the plugins otherwise there will be no
sane way to validate a set of plugins works against a given version of
Maven. What I'm thinking about here concretely is testing all the
plugins that we have here against Maven 2.1 to know that we have not
screwed something up so terribly that things like the deploy plugin
doesn't work, or whatever.
I think how this starts is that we:
1) Pick one of the tools
2) Create a touchstone project that can be expanded where necessary
for any given plugin so that we have a baseline project against which
to test
3) Pick a standard profile name for invoking this test
This way we create a standard hook point for a larger harness to get
hold off. We can check out sources and create an aggregator POM with
the given profile activated to test a set of plugins. I don't know yet
what the best way would be to share a touchstone project (and that is
not to say we won't need different projects but we have to start with
a baseline), but once we start this we can also start plugging in
other things like integration testing that includes things like
coverage or whatever else.
I think the key in moving forward is getting 1-3 sorted out so we're
not using 5 frameworks and testing plugins with N different patterns
where it's impossible to hook into for larger scale testing. I think
this is the only way forward to validate that a set of plugins work
against a given version of Maven which is vital information to know
before releasing 2.1.
For integration testing I have found the SHITTY plugin (we would
simply have to change that name, sorry Jason Dillon) to be the most
useful and feature rich. Should be relatively simple to create a test
project, and a profile name (run-its like the core ITs). Then we
figure out how to share and version the test project to create a
stable baseline. I chatted about this briefly in IRC with Benjamin and
wanted to get the information out. I think it's vital to get this
rolling if we want to roll out a 2.1-alpha-1 with some degree of
confidence we have toasted a bunch of plugins due to incompatibilities
in the core.
Thanks,
Jason
----------------------------------------------------------
Jason van Zyl
Founder, Apache Maven
jason at sonatype dot com
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What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people
can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save bad people.
-- Paul Graham
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