Test::Harness in Core

[David Golden]

On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 12:52 PM, Eric Wilhelm<scratchcomputing at gmail.com> wrote:
>>But please do it in Test::Harness.  That's where you need the plugin
>>capability to let a simple Test::Harness live in core and let people
>>extend it in their own tests.
>
> I disagree.  I considered Test::Harness deprecated and TAP::Harness to
> be the new entry-point for adding features.  Test::Harness is stuck
> with back-compat, which means some behavior doesn't flex very well
> because of age-old failed assumptions.  For example, try running tests
> against a different perl binary than the one driving the harness.

That's not what I'm talking about.

It's 'deprecated' for new development, but it's not deprecated in
general usage due to the same back-compatibility problems that plague
the rest of the toolchain.  (Hurrah for configure_requires, but we'll
be 10 years before we can assume it as standard.)

So my suggestion is to fix the back-compatibility so that it's easy to
(a) use features already in TAP::Harness and (b) use new features in
TAP::Harness extensions or plugins.

HARNESS_SUBCLASS is one step in the right direction, I think, but it's
a very narrow solution.  I think a little more consideration for how
to be backwards *and* forwards compatible would be helpful for
accomplishing Ovid's goal.

-- David