On Tuesday 11 January 2005 16:32, Beman Dawes wrote:
I beg to differ. Having to supply all that boilerplate would be a huge disincentive.
If that functionality were exposed separately, putting it together in one macro with all the options you want to would be absolutely trivial. Then all you would write is BOOST_TEST_MY_MAIN And if that's not good enough, then you get your hands dirty and write main.
If Gennadiy can provide addition functionality making it easier for those needing more startup/shutdown control, great. But it shouldn't come at any cost to those who don't need that functionality.
From my point of view, it's more important to provide that functionality than to keep the ease of use. Otherwise it might simply come a time that you can't use it (combining it with another library that also provides its own custom main). Fortunately, once that functionality is provided, wrapping it in your own macro with the exact options you want is quite trivial.
The more I think about it though, the more I see that the problem lies in the fact that Boost.Test is trying to do double-duty. On one hand, it's a unit-test framework to efficiently create and run unit tests. On the other hand, it's a part of the Boost.Test library, and tries to conform to certain outputs and command-line arguments, and that's why main is tightly controlled. Those two aspects should really be separated. The Boost.Test component can provide a main function that parses the command-line in a certain way, and calls the unit test framework accordingly. But people should also be free to use the unit test framework without being tied to that. For example, I might want to set different options (like what log to use) based on a command-line parameter, or set exception-handling on/off based on whether the debugger is present. Another way of separating those two aspects would be simply to create another library with what's right now in test_main.cpp. If you link to that library, you get the standard main. Otherwise you need to provide your own. Does that make sense? --Noel Games from Within http://www.gamesfromwithin.com