Re: unit tests and related matters

On Sunday, July 21, 2013 01:28:49 AM Jan Wielemaker wrote:
> On 07/21/2013 03:11 AM, Ross Boylan wrote:
> > On Saturday, July 20, 2013 03:14:25 PM Nicos Angelopoulos wrote:
> >> Dear Ross,
> >> 
> >> You will be better off installing a newer version.
> > 
> > Is there any easy way to tell how the versions differ?  I looked around
> > the web site and source; all I found was http://www.swi-
> > prolog.org/git/pl.git/tree/HEAD:/ReleaseNotes which has release notes for
> > 5.10.  The mail archive turned up some relase announcements, which do
> > show changelogs, so they must be somewhere.  Something higher level
> > would be good; the release notes in the emails seem to cover differences
> > from the immediately preceding release only.
> 
> You get all of it using a request like this (be patient; takes long):
> 
> 	http://www.swi-prolog.org/ChangeLog?branch=stable&from=5.10.4&to=6.4.0
That's pretty cool.
> 
> It won't make you very happy though. There is three years of development
> between these two versions. Debian was held back for a long time due to
> lack of an active maintainer and and portability problems with some of
> Debian's targets. This was resolved some time ago thanks to Eugeniy
> Meshcheryakov.  Unfortunately, this was too late for Debian 7.0, so I
> fear that Debian users must compile from source or wait another couple
> of years.
> 
> I fear that the Ubuntu PPA's don't work, but you might check these
> out.  See http://www.swi-prolog.org/build/Debian.txt
> 
> > Did you mean better off in general, or specifically for testing?  I see
> > from Michael's post (thanks) that  some tools require a newer version of
> > SWI prolog.
> 
> There are not that many changes to plunit. From my head, the only change
> is that assertion/1 is intercepted by PlUnit to produce coherent
> messages and testing results. There might be some changes to keep
> up-to-date with the core of SWI-Prolog. PlUnit uses some undocumented
> low-level interfaces.
The changelog shows
Package plunit

[Feb 5 2013]

    FIXED: Consider tests in which assertions failed as failed tests. Guenter 
Kniesel.

[Sep 6 2012]

    PORT: YAP Integration

[Jul 29 2012]

    ISO: Use \c instead of \<newline>

[Jun 1 2012]

    FIXED: Coverage analysis using show_coverage/1. Johan Romme. This patch is 
a serious cleanup of this code, using more robust coding techniques.

[Mar 26 2012]

    ENHANCED: Better feedback on all/set failed comparison

[Nov 23 2011]

    MODIFIED: Compatibility with module-classification in SWI-Prolog 
'$declare_module'/5 is changed into '$declare_module'/6

[Nov 19 2011]

    FIXED: Admin of running threads.
    ADDED: Untested infrastructure for assertions inside test clauses.

[Jul 10 2011]

    FIXED: Avoid permission error of the test-unit target module exists, but 
is empty. Alan Baljeu.

Ross