future plans for mauve

[Noa Resare <noa@resare.com>]

Hello

While using mauve for a while now I have felt an urge to put some time
into change/fix some things that I think could be done better. This will
not happen right now, as I would like to see kaffe-1.1.5 out the door
first and I'm going offline for a week tonight but I thought it would be
a good idea to share my ideas with the list anyway, especially since
David Gilbert seems to be thinking about using a mauve for testing other
code than the class library.

Note that these are just random thoughts, and I'm really open to
suggestions.


* The './configure; make tests ARGS' invocation scheme is a little odd.
I'd like to have a small script perhaps called 'mauve' that took
arguments --java=/path/to/java --javac=/path/to/javac. The rest of the
args should be like the KEYS variable.

* Changes in mauve-KEYWORD files should trigger a recalculation of which
classes should be tested.

* The mechanism now implemented in the choose script should be faster
and written in a language more suited for the task. java perhaps?

* Improved documentation. There should be a 'write a new test guide' of
some sort. 

* Package structure. The part that could be called the 'testlet api'
should live in gnu.testlet. The test runner implementation should be in
gnu.mauve.runner (?) and test hierarchy perhaps in gnu.mauve.tests.

* Improved progress reporting when doing the tests.

/noa