Harness

Currently Harness supports testing using remote terminal over SSH and SOAP testing.
In addition to that it is needed to support local execution of processes started and controlled during test execution.
The simplest case is starting a local command to list local directory. More advanced example may be starting an external tool to run unit tests suite.

I think it can be done in two ways:
- emulating TTY that wraps subprocess input and output streams. That would allow for using all TerminalTestable tests. The problem is it requires running native code to trick subprocess to think its executed inside TTY (tried to use bash in interactive mode to substitute SSH session, but failed, as that needs TTY to work). In best case that would need additional dependencies.
- creating dedicated Executor that works on subprocess input and output streams, that requires few new tests to implement as most of tests providing input and output are TerminalTestable. I started to implement something like StreamTestExecutor to work with IO streams or pipes. It will limit number of available Harness commands but it should be enough to work with locally forked processes if we dont need screen capture.

Given that the feature must support Windows and Linux I am leaning towards the second way.
If you have other ideas please share.

I've implemented support for so called stream - maybe I should call it pipe. Its a simple feature that allows filtering piped output from a subprocess and writing text to piped input of subprocess that allows controlling input and output of the process.

• stream-write - write to subprocess input pipe
• stream-read - read from subprocess output pipe into a variable
• stream-wait-for - wait for given string appear on subprocess output pipe.

It works under Linux, I need to test it under Windows.

Example scenario may look like:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<test name="cross_session_002" description="First cross session test" >
    <stream-write value="echo abc" newline="true"/>
    <stream-write value="echo test2" newline="true"/>
    <stream-wait-for value="test2"/>
</test>

Updated Documentation to include stream-write, stream-wait-for and stream-read test and -shell command line option. Added description of options for <target type="stream"/>

Can we close this?

Greg Shah wrote:

Can we close this?

Yes please