urchin/HISTORY

HISTORY
=======

Version 0.1.0-rc1
---------------------
This release includes breaking changes.

### Test root directory
We introduce a concept of the root directory of a test suite.
Such a concept is important in case you want to run subsets of your
test suite, as we need to know how far up to apply the setup
and teardown files.

The Urchin root directory is determined by moving higher in the directory
tree in search of a file named `.urchin`.
The closest directory that contains such a file is considered the root.
In the following filesystem, for example, `/a/b/c` would be the root.

    mkdir -p /a/b/c/d
    touch /a/b/c/d/e
    chmod +x /a/b/c/d/e
    touch /a/b/c/.urchin
    urchin /a/b/c/d

There are two situations in which we would stop looking without having
found a `.urchin` file.

1. The system root, `/`, because we can't go any higher
2. A directory that starts with a dot, because an urchin call on a higher
   directory would ignore such a directory

In either of these cases, Urchin uses the user-specified directory as
the root; this is how Urchin `0.0.*` worked.

Molly guard
------------
The Molly-guard works differently because it now considers the test suite
root directory. The point of the Molly-guard originally was to protect
you from things like this.

    urchin /

Urchin would run fine if called on a directory named something like "test",

    urchin test

and it would fail on directories named something else, like `/`.
Unfortunately, it would also fail on directories like this.

    urchin test/database

It now now looks instead at the basename of the test suite root directory and
otherwise ignores the entered directory. Urchin runs without error if the basename contains the phrase "test".

As before, you can override the Molly guard with `-f`.

    urchin -f build-scripts

### Skipping of tests
Previously, tests were run if they were executable and were otherwise marked
as skipped. Now, an executable script can indicate that it is skipped by
exiting with code 3.  For example, if a test requires some dependancy, it
might look for the dependency and then skip if it does not see the dependency.
It might look like this.

    #!/bin/sh
    if which inkscape; then
      exit 3 # status code 3 for skip
    fi
    inkscape blah blah ...

I chose status code 3 sort of arbitrarily at first, but it turns out that it
would the appropriate status code if these tests were Nagios plugins, as the
concept of skipping a test is similar to the Nagios concept of unknown service
status (https://nagios-plugins.org/doc/guidelines.html#AEN78).

Version 0.0.6
---------------------

* Produce TAP output with the -t flag.
* Add a + sign in front of directories in the normal output so that they
  line up with non-directories.
* Display skipped tests in the normal output and in the TAP output.
* Correct some things in the documentation.
* Rearrange things in the documentation to be more clear.
* Pass the -e flag to exit urchin if any single test fails.
* Remove the undocumented, experimental -x flag now that shall exists.
* Display version number with the -v flag.
* Document why Urchin is called "Urchin"
* Update TODO
* Support mksh (Change a printf command.)
* Make long lines shorter.

These changes are made somewhat separately in the branches "exit-on-fail",
"remove-urchin-x", "tap", and "update-readme". They are rebased into one
branch, "tlevine-2016-02", for merging into "master".

Version 0.0.5
---------------------
* urchin now unsets `CDPATH`.
* The documentation for `urchin -x` was removed because it was confusing.

Version 0.0.4
---------------------
* Switch urchin -x to urchin -sh and fix some problems with it
* Documentation

Version 0.0.3
---------------------
General tidying

Run with different shells in three ways

* urchin -s
* $TEST_SHELL variable with $TEST_SHELL
* $TEST_SHELL variable with urchin -sh

Set NULL_GLOB so zsh doesn't print a warning.

Before version 0.0.3
----------------------
We adjusted the input parameters so it is harder to accidentally run all executable files in you
r home directory.

We added directory-based indents.