[Perlunit-devel] Suggestions for a PerlUnit conundrum?

[Matthias F. <mf...@hi...>]

Hi all,

I've written a TestDecorator for PerlUnit that runs the tests in a suite
in parallel -- a very useful feature when testing the results of a series
of web queries, since they're time consuming.  (I did this a while ago in
JUnit, but it was rather easier there thanks to threading.) 

The problem I've hit has to do with the interprocess communication.  I
used the Perl built-in interface to SysV message queues -- msgsnd, msgrcv,
etc., or rather the SysV::* wrapper classes -- to let the parallel test
results be combined into one result set.  The problem is that the message
queue or queues created will never get cleaned up if the test is cancelled
by the user or crashes; they'll just clutter up the OS.  And trying to
trap signals to clean up the mess on exit is, by all accounts, impossible
to do reliably and safely. 

Any suggestions from PerlUnitLand?  I'd welcome either practical solutions
to this problem, or even suggestions for another approach entirely.  My
ulterior motive is that I think this decorator is useful enough to be made
public, possibly even bundled with PerlUnit, but I don't want to do that
unless it's more robust than this. 

-- Matthias