C TAP Harness 4.6

C TAP Harness is my test framework for C software packages.

This release is mostly a release for my own convenience to pick up the reformatting of the code using clang-format, as mentioned in my previous release of rra-c-util. There are no other user-visible changes in this release.

I did do one more bit of housekeeping, namely added proper valgrind testing support to the test infrastructure. I now run the test suite under valgrind as part of the release process to look for any memory leaks or other errors in the harness or in the C TAP library.

The test suite for this package is written entirely in shell (with some C helpers), and I'm now regretting that. The original goal was to make this package maximally portable, but I ended up adding Perl tests anyway to test the POD source for the manual pages, and then to test a few other things, and now the test suite effectively depends on Perl and could have from the start. At some point, I'll probably rewrite the test machinery in Perl, which will make it far more maintainable and easier to read.

I think I've now finally learned my lesson for new packages: Trying to do things in shell for portability isn't worth it. As soon as any bit of code becomes non-trivial, and possibly before then, switch to a more maintainable programming language with better primitives and library support.

You can get the latest release from the C TAP Harness distribution page.