[java-gnome-hackers] Does junit-4 provide the JUnit 3 API?

[Andrew C. <an...@op...>]

The other day someone ran into a strange situation that they had junit-4
installed but not junit[-3]. We of course probe for JUnit 3.8 and quite
correctly didn't accept what she did have because they didn't had there.

A bit later, someone suggested that junit 4.x can run tests written to
the junit 3.8 API; Thijs, Kenneth, and I looked around and saw lots of
people complaining that this would have a bad ending. And certainly most
build & packaging systems I know of go to quite some trouble to identify
and ship them separately. Based on that alone I would have expected
junit-4 to not be a strict upgrade from junit.

On the other hand, I was fairly sure that JUnit 4.x ships classes that
allow you to run original tests against it. Just for the heck of it I
manually changed my build to use junit-4 for a moment and it compiled
and then executed the tests fine.

So if someone who knows can comment authoritatively, perhaps we can
accept the presence of junit-4 (should it be available without finding
junit) to satisfy our test infrastructure requirement when probing?

Anyway, until and unless the answer to this comes up "yes, it's fine",
java-gnome depends on junit-3.8, as it has since the beginning.

[Our tests will continue to be written to the original JUnit 3 API. It's
more than fine for our purposes, and we have no need to depend on
junit-4 as a result]

AfC
Sydney