The Greg testing framework

Greg is a framework for testing other programs and libraries. Its purpose is to provide a single front end for all tests and to be a small, simple framework for writing tests. Greg leverages off the Guile language to provide all the power (and more) of other test frameworks with greater simplicity and ease of use.

The simplicity of the Greg framework makes it easy to write tests for any program, but it was specifically written for use with GNUstep-Guile to permit direct testing of the GNUstep libraries without the necessity to run a separate driver program.

The core functionality of Greg is a Guile module which can be loaded into any software with an embedded Guile interpreter. Any program which uses Guile as it's scripting language can therefore use Greg to test itself directly!

For testing external programs, Greg provides a compiled module that may be dynamically linked into Guile to permit you to run an application as a child process on a pseudo-terminal. In conjunction with the standard Guile `expect' module, this lets you test external programs.

Also provided is greg - a Guile script to invoke the Greg test framework in much the same way that runtest is used in DejaGNU.

All tests have the same output format (enforced by the greg-testcase procedure). Greg's output is designed to be both readable and readily parsed by other software, so that it can be used as input to customised testing processes.

Greg provides most of the functionality of DejaGNU but is rather simpler. It omits specific support for cross-platform/remote testing since this is really rather trivial to add where required and tends to vary from site to site so much that an attempt at a generic solution is pretty pointless. What Greg does do, is provide hooks to let you easily introduce site specific code for handling those sorts of situations.

The current version of Greg can normally be found on GNU ftp sites, with documentation online at http://www.gnu.org/software/greg/gregdoc.html

or, for the bleeding edge - availably by anonymous cvs as part of the GNUstep-Guile package in the GNUstep project -

CVSROOT=":pserver:[email protected]:/gnustep"
export CVSROOT
cvs login (password is `anoncvs')
cvs -z3 checkout guile

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Updated: 12 Mar 2000 Richard Frith-Macdonald