[rvm-core] RVM-970: Environment for unit tests

[Erik B. <eri...@gm...>]

Hi,

I took a look at João's patch and IMHO it looks good overall.

I've got some feedback and questions, though:

1) Failing tests currently do not fail the build. What's the reasoning 
behind that?

2) Why is a separate ensure-junit target needed? If unit tests are going 
to be run during every build, the contents of ensure-junit could be put 
into check-components-properties, which is run anyway. Also, 
ensure-junit does not need to depend on compile. Depending on compile 
forces the eclipse-project target to run compile which it did not do before.

3) On my system, the bootstrap-unit-tests are run after the package 
target. Perhaps it makes sense to make the package target depend on 
bootstrap-unit-tests instead of compile. This way, the package phase 
would not be run if a unit test failed the build.

4) Are users encouraged to run the tests from the command line? If so: a 
target can be made to appear in the output of "ant -projecthelp" by 
setting the description property of the target.

5) The Jikes RVM cannot be used with Harmony at the moment but AFAIK 
there's been no decision to stop supporting Harmony. IMHO this means 
that the harmony-specific-part of the eclipse-project target needs to be 
updated, too.

6) I've looked at the dependency graph of build.xml in Eclipse using 
eclipseant2dot ( http://eclipseant2dot.ertale.com/ ) and noticed that 
the rvm-unit-tests target would not be executed if someone would use the 
profiled-image target. I don't know if anyone is using that target but I 
thought I'd mention it anyway.

I think that João's patch is a good, first step and I'm looking forward 
to future patches from him.


Kind regards,

Erik Brangs

PS: What's the status for the other GSoC projects? Midterm evaluations 
start next week and the community has not yet had a chance to offer 
feedback on the other GSoC projects.