1.1   Development Status

Testilence is in early stages of development, output of the command line tool lacks lots of essential information, and the reporting and presentation circuits [9] of the library need much work. Test isolation is still not perfect: environment, installed functions and classes, error handler, etc. still carry over from previous tests; certain forms of misuse will kill the command line tool with a fatal error.

That said, Testilence is already quite usable, and has gone through lots or realworld use.

1.2   Mailing Lists

See http://lists.testilence.org/.

2.1   Class structure

The smallest unit of tests is the test case class. It defines any number of test methods, and optionally either of setUp and tearDown methods (or both). Testilence provides an abstract test case base class with a number of assertFoo() methods, and a test suite class which allows arbitrary nesting of cases and suites, thanks to the Composite organization.

2.2   Runtime behavior

Runtime behavior is illustrated with the following simplified snippet of pseudocode.

$suite = new my_suite

for each $case in $suite do:
  for each $test in $case do:
    $o = new $case
    set_up $o
    $test $o
    tear_down $o
  done
done

Note that each test method is run on a separate instance.

3.1   Buildtime requirements

The build and installation mechanism requires a subset of the POSIX shell environment, plus make. On Windows, either Cygwin [10] or MSYS [11] is needed to build Testilence and run its commandline interface.

Repository checkouts require Docutils [12] to build HTML documentation.

3.2   Library runtime requirements

The Testilence library has the following runtime requirements:

• PHP >= 5.1.3 (with PCRE, Reflection, SPL)

  Testilence works with 5.1.3 or higher. Expect a bump to 5.2.0 (for better __toString() behavior). Expect addition of any of these PHP modules: operator [13], pcntl [14], posix [15], runkit [16], xdebug [17].

• BSD, Linux, or UNIX

  This is a conservative statement.

  Some features might be missing on non-POSIX systems. Testilence is written with preference for portability, and should work on Microsoft Windows as is. Windows is, however, a second-tier operating system, problems are bound to appear from time to time.

3.3   Command line interface runtime requirements

The Testilence command line interface, tence, requires a subset of the POSIX shell environment. Besides that, its runtime requirements are the same as the library requirements, plus:

• Console_Getopt [18] from PEAR

  Expect this to change to a different library.

Note: the POSIX shell requirement means tence doesn't work in the command line interpreters found in Microsoft Windows (command.com and cmd.exe), and needs to be run from a Cygwin [10] or MSYS [11] shell instead.

4.1   Repository

The latest source get be checked out from the Mercurial [19] repository [20], which is also available for anonymous browsing [21].

4.2   Official tarballs

Testilence source releases are distributed as bzip2ed tarballs created with either Tim Kientzle's bsdtar [22] or GNU tar, Julian Seward's bzip2 [23] in all cases. Your operating system should include compatible extraction tools.

All Testilence releases can be found in the download directory [24].

5.1   From a package

The most comfortable way to install Testilence is using your operating system's packaging system. Ask your OS vendor for a package of the latest Testilence release.

The source distribution includes a FreeBSD port skeleton.

5.2   From the source

% url=http://www.testilence.org/dist/testilence-x.y.x.tar.bz2
% fetch -o - $url | tar -xjf -
% cd testilence-x.y.z
% ./configure
% make check
% sudo make install

7.1   Overview

Testilence consists of a library and a command line test runner. The library is perfectly usable without the tool.

7.2   Command line interface

tence, the command line frontend, is documented in the accompanying man page.

Source code for the command line tool can be found in the src/tence [26] subdirectory in the source distribution.

7.3   Library

Testilence Library Reference [27] describes public interfaces and behaviors.

Source code for the library can be found in the src/Testilence [28] subdirectory in the source distribution.

9.1   Release types

Testilence releases fall into one of the following four categories:

• snapshots
• bugfix releases
• new functionality
• backward-incompatible change

9.2   Release versioning

Each release is tagged with a version number string with the following structure (ABNF [32]):

version-string = compat-cnt "." newfun-cnt "." bugfix-cnt [rel-candidate]
compat-cnt     = counter
newfun-cnt     = counter
bugfix-cnt     = counter
rel-candidate  = "." snapshot counter
; "snap"
snapshot       = %x73.6e.61.70
; counter is a positive integer (includes 0)
counter        = 1 * DIGIT

For each release of any type the appropriate counter is incremented by at least one and counters to the right of it are reset to 0 (the release-candidate part is removed altogether), while counters to the left of it are left at their current values.

Version string of the first nonsnapshot Testilence release is 0.0.0, while "0.0.0.snap135" is the version string of a pre-0.0.0 snapshot. There may be gaps between.

This handling is consistent with the way FreeBSD's pkg_version -t [33] interprets version strings.