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NAME

     atf-test-case — generic description of test cases

DESCRIPTION

     A test case is a piece of code that stress-tests a specific feature of the software.  This
     feature is typically self-contained enough, either in the amount of code that implements it
     or in the general idea that describes it, to warrant its independent testing.  Given this,
     test cases are very fine-grained, but they attempt to group similar smaller tests which are
     semantically related.

     A test case is defined by three components regardless of the language it is implemented in:
     a header, a body and a cleanup routine.  The header is, basically, a declarative piece of
     code that defines several properties to describe what the test case does and how it behaves.
     In other words: it defines the test case's meta-data, further described in the Meta-data
     section.  The body is the test case itself.  It executes all actions needed to reproduce the
     test, and checks for failures.  This body is only executed if the abstract conditions
     specified by the header are met.  The cleanup routine is a piece of code always executed
     after the body, regardless of the exit status of the test case.  It can be used to undo
     side-effects of the test case.  Note that almost all side-effects of a test case are
     automatically cleaned up by the library; this is explained in more detail in the rest of
     this document.

     It is extremely important to keep the separation between a test case's header and body well-
     defined, because the header is always parsed, whereas the body is only executed when the
     conditions defined in the header are met and when the user specifies that test case.

     At last, test cases are always contained into test programs.  The test programs act as a
     front-end to them, providing a consistent interface to the user and several APIs to ease
     their implementation.

   Results
     Upon termination, a test case reports a status and, optionally, a textual reason describing
     why the test reported such status.  The caller must ensure that the test case really
     performed the task that its status describes, as the test program may be bogus and therefore
     providing a misleading result, e.g., providing a result that indicates success but the error
     code of the program says otherwise.

     The possible exit status of a test case are one of the following:

     expected_death      The test case expects to terminate abruptly.

     expected_exit       The test case expects to exit cleanly.

     expected_failure    The test case expects to exit with a controller fatal/non-fatal failure.
                         If this happens, the test program exits with a success error code.

     expected_signal     The test case expects to receive a signal that makes it terminate.

     expected_timeout    The test case expects to execute for longer than its timeout.

     passed              The test case was executed successfully.  The test program exits with a
                         success error code.

     skipped             The test case could not be executed because some preconditions were not
                         met.  This is not a failure because it can typically be resolved by
                         adjusting the system to meet the necessary conditions.  This is always
                         accompanied by a reason, a message describing why the test was skipped.
                         The test program exits with a success error code.

     failed              An error appeared during the execution of the test case.  This is always
                         accompanied by a reason, a message describing why the test failed.  The
                         test program exits with a failure error code.

     The usefulness of the ‘expected_*’ results comes when writing test cases that verify known
     failures caused, in general, due to programming errors (aka bugs).  Whenever the faulty
     condition that the ‘expected_*’ result is trying to cover is fixed, then the test case will
     be reported as ‘failed’ and the developer will have to adjust it to match its new condition.

     It is important to note that all ‘expected_*’ results are only provided as a hint to the
     caller; the caller must verify that the test case did actually terminate as the expected
     condition says.

   Input/output
     Test cases are free to print whatever they want to their stdout(4) and stderr(4) file
     descriptors.  They are, in fact, encouraged to print status information as they execute to
     keep the user informed of their actions.  This is specially important for long test cases.

     Test cases will log their results to an auxiliary file, which is then collected by the test
     program they are contained in.  The developer need not care about this as long as he uses
     the correct APIs to implement the test cases.

     The standard input of the test cases is unconditionally connected to ‘/dev/zero’.

   Meta-data
     The following metadata properties can be exposed via the test case's head:

     descr              Type: textual.  Required.

                        A brief textual description of the test case's purpose.  Will be shown to
                        the user in reports.  Also good for documentation purposes.

     has.cleanup        Type: boolean.  Optional.

                        If set to true, specifies that the test case has a cleanup routine that
                        has to be executed by the runtime engine during the cleanup phase of the
                        execution.  This property is automatically set by the framework when
                        defining a test case with a cleanup routine, so it should never be set by
                        hand.

     ident              Type: textual.  Required.

                        The test case's identifier.  Must be unique inside the test program and
                        should be short but descriptive.

     require.arch       Type: textual.  Optional.

                        A whitespace separated list of architectures that the test case can be
                        run under without causing errors due to an architecture mismatch.

     require.config     Type: textual.  Optional.

                        A whitespace separated list of configuration variables that must be
                        defined to execute the test case.  If any of the required variables is
                        not defined, the test case is skipped.

     require.diskspace  Type: integer.  Optional.  Specifies the minimum amount of available disk
                        space needed by the test.  The value can have a size suffix such as ‘K’,
                        ‘M’, ‘G’ or ‘T’ to make the amount of bytes easier to type and read.

     require.files      Type: textual.  Optional.

                        A whitespace separated list of files that must be present to execute the
                        test case.  The names of these files must be absolute paths.  If any of
                        the required files is not found, the test case is skipped.

     require.machine    Type: textual.  Optional.

                        A whitespace separated list of machine types that the test case can be
                        run under without causing errors due to a machine type mismatch.

     require.memory     Type: integer.  Optional.  Specifies the minimum amount of physical
                        memory needed by the test.  The value can have a size suffix such as ‘K’,
                        ‘M’, ‘G’ or ‘T’ to make the amount of bytes easier to type and read.

     require.progs      Type: textual.  Optional.

                        A whitespace separated list of programs that must be present to execute
                        the test case.  These can be given as plain names, in which case they are
                        looked in the user's PATH, or as absolute paths.  If any of the required
                        programs is not found, the test case is skipped.

     require.user       Type: textual.  Optional.

                        The required privileges to execute the test case.  Can be one of ‘root’
                        or ‘unprivileged’.

                        If the test case is running as a regular user and this property is
                        ‘root’, the test case is skipped.

                        If the test case is running as root and this property is ‘unprivileged’,
                        the runtime engine will automatically drop the privileges if the
                        ‘unprivileged-user’ configuration property is set; otherwise the test
                        case is skipped.

     timeout            Type: integral.  Optional; defaults to ‘300’.

                        Specifies the maximum amount of time the test case can run.  This is
                        particularly useful because some tests can stall either because they are
                        incorrectly coded or because they trigger an anomalous behavior of the
                        program.  It is not acceptable for these tests to stall the whole
                        execution of the test program.

                        Can optionally be set to zero, in which case the test case has no run-
                        time limit.  This is discouraged.

     X-‘NAME’           Type: textual.  Optional.

                        A user-defined property named ‘NAME’.  These properties are free form,
                        have no special meaning within ATF, and can be specified at will by the
                        test case.  The runtime engine should propagate these properties from the
                        test case to the end user so that the end user can rely on custom
                        properties for test case tagging and classification.

   Environment
     Every time a test case is executed, several environment variables are cleared or reseted to
     sane values to ensure they do not make the test fail due to unexpected conditions.  These
     variables are:

     HOME           Set to the work directory's path.

     LANG           Undefined.

     LC_ALL         Undefined.

     LC_COLLATE     Undefined.

     LC_CTYPE       Undefined.

     LC_MESSAGES    Undefined.

     LC_MONETARY    Undefined.

     LC_NUMERIC     Undefined.

     LC_TIME        Undefined.

     TZ             Hardcoded to ‘UTC’.

   Work directories
     The test program always creates a temporary directory and switches to it before running the
     test case's body.  This way the test case is free to modify its current directory as it
     wishes, and the runtime engine will be able to clean it up later on in a safe way, removing
     any traces of its execution from the system.  To do so, the runtime engine will perform a
     recursive removal of the work directory without crossing mount points; if a mount point is
     found, the file system will be unmounted (if possible).

   File creation mode mask (umask)
     Test cases are always executed with a file creation mode mask (umask) of ‘0022’.  The test
     case's code is free to change this during execution.

SEE ALSO

     atf-test-program(1)