Andy Armstrong wrote:
With TAP that'd require either adding a persistent identifier to tests,
requiring that the test numbering doesn't change over time (new tests
added at the end) or that there's some heuristic that attempts to track
assertions that have been renumbered.
Requiring that test numbering doesn't change seems like an awfully large
burden. It would mean you couldn't add extra values to a loop with a
test in it, for example (unless it happened to be at the end of your
test). It would be difficult to enforce, easy to forget/ignore/not know
about, and failure would be awkward.
A heuristic would be complicated and fragile, and if (when) it went awry
your data would, again, go screwy.
As such, I think I'd favour the persistent identifier approach, and add
an extra argument to each test assertion:
is ( $got, $exptected, $test_name, $id );
You could then create and use a subclass of Test::More to care about the
extra argument. Anyone just using plain Test::More wouldn't see any
difference. It wouldn't be particularly taxing when writing tests, and
would only impact those who felt that it would give them some benefit.
I'm not sure how you'd deal with not using Test::More (or that use
Test::More internally), or using things that do stuff like
all_pod_files_ok(), but those seem like solvable problems.
Ian
