[Cppunit-devel] A few notes about my first experience with cppunit.

[Ferdinando A. <fer...@am...>]

Hi all

I maintain the QuantLib project (http://quantlib.org). QuantLib is a cross 
platform (Win32, *nix, Mac) cross compiler (Visual Studio, Borland, gcc, 
etc.) C++ library for quantitave finance.

QuantLib is also available as Python extension, and QuantLib-Python has a 
Python unit test suite. We heavily rely on this suite to test the 
underlying C++ layer.
As QuantLib and QuantLib-Python (may) have separate development I would 
like to add a pure C++ unit test suite.

A few notes about my first cppunit experience:

1) You may consider updating the C++ links at 
http://www.xprogramming.com/software.htm. This page points to the old 
versions of cppunit. I toyed with them, and I was going to write to the 
authors about setting up a sourceforge project.
I checked the availability of cppunit.sourceforge.net and - bingo! - I 
found the active project.
A "c++ unit test" search on google is of no help (except it points to 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/unittest/)

2) I opened TestRunner.dsw and I tried to compile the project TestRunner.
The first errors were because of the inclusion directive
#include <cppunit/extensions/TestDecorator.h>
Adding the cppunit/include path to the project didn't help, I had to add it 
to my VS settings, as if I had installed cppunit (probably because of the <>)
Then I got linking errors. If I've been naive please help me (I can post 
the error messages if needed)

3) I switched to cygwin for the usual configure-make dance.
Configure was OK, make failed since cygwin do not recognize my doxygen 
installation (this is a different problem: cygwin fails to use programs 
under "Program Files", probably because of the blank space).
I would humbly suggest to have a different directive for document 
generation, something like:
if DOXYGEN_FOUND
docs:
	$(DOXYGEN) Doxyfile.in
else
docs:
	echo You need to install doxygen in order to generate documentation.
endif

4) It would be nice to have a Win32 binary visual installer. This can be 
easily supported with NSIS (http://www.nullsoft.com/free/nsis/). NSIS is 
free and it is script driven. I could help creating the cppunit installer 
script, if somebody help me to select which *.h is needed, etc.

One last question: why there is a separate include and source folder for msvc6

In the meantime I'm switching to my Mandrake Linux box ....


ciao -- Nando