[Nagiosplug-devel] [ nagiosplug-Patches-1185704 ] New Testing Infrastructure

[SourceForge.net]

Patches item #1185704, was opened at 2005-04-19 17:31
Message generated for change (Tracker Item Submitted) made by Item Submitter
You can respond by visiting: 
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=397599&aid=1185704&group_id=29880

Category: Enhancement
Group: None
Status: Open
Resolution: None
Priority: 5
Submitted By: Peter Bray (illumino)
Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Summary: New Testing Infrastructure

Initial Comment:
The attched gzip'd tar archive contains a complete
replacement for the Nagios Plugins 1.4.0 testing
infrastructure and all currently written test
harnesses. I hope that it will meet with the approval
of the Nagios Plugins Team and replace the existing
infrastructure.

I have provided documentation of the key functions of the
infrastructure in the perl module NPTest.pm and the
test harnesses themselves should provide plenty of
working examples for further assisting a test harness
developer.

I hope this infrastructure will ease & encourage the
development of test harnesses for all of the Nagios
Plugins.

Reasoning behind the redevelopment:

* I have always had trouble with the existing
infrastructure,
  it never seemed to create the "Cache.pm", and the testing
  would not function until I had manually created it.

* The test harnesses themselves were out of date with
respect to the Nagios Plugins 1.4.0 test results.

* It was not possible to debug the existing test
harness during execution, as the values returned by the
execution of the plug-in were never shown to the user.
Making updating of out-of-date regexps more time consuming.

* Test harnesses themselves were not directly
executable. Although I did manage to work around this.

Attributes of the new infrastructure:

* A single perl module provides the bulk of the logic.
  The Cache and Helper Modules are no longer required.
  Aside: I considered rolling all of test.pl into the
  module, so that could be with "perl -MNPTest -e
RunAll ..."
  but that is not in the current implementation, but its
  trivial.

* The workhorse function "checkCmd" supports
    * debugging
    * flexible exit status testing
    * graceful handling of exceptions
    * makes each test case more concise and easier to read

* All test harnesses are directly executable.

* All test harnesses are self contained. They no longer 
  rely on the wrapper to provide test parameters.
  This could be seen as a negative, but not having to
  update the wrapper every time a new test parameter
  is added will simplify development.

* The new test parameter cache is much more flexible,
  including support for default values, environment
variable
  overrides and even scoped parameters should the need
arise.


I hope these attributes and the corrections to the existing
test harnesses will make the contribution a worth while
addition to the Nagios Plugins code base.

Peter Bray
Sydney, Australia

LEGAL STUFF: The submission is made "AS IS" with
without express or implied warranty. The contribution
may be used, redistributed and/or modified under the
same terms as the Nagios Plugins release.


----------------------------------------------------------------------

You can respond by visiting: 
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=397599&aid=1185704&group_id=29880