Hi!

ATF[1] is a SoC 2007 project aimed at bringing a new automated  
testing framework for NetBSD.  It is still very much *work in  
progress*, but I thought I could give you a preview anyway to get  
some early feedback.  Don't complain too much about the code kwality  
nor the user interface yet; these two will get much better (specially  
the latter, which at the moment is the most unpolished area of the  
whole thing).

ATF will be distributed as a standalone program so that projects  
other than NetBSD can easily take advantage of it if they want to.   
However, it will be highly integrated into NetBSD and it will be  
NetBSD's responsibility to write test cases for its own features.   
ATF provides only the necessary framework to ease this process.

Trying ATF alone is easy.  Just grab the development sources from the  
web site (as explained there) and install them as usual.  But this is  
not interesting enough.

Seeing how ATF integrates with NetBSD is what is interesting, but is  
also harder to do: you have to apply multiple patches to the NetBSD  
tree and then rebuild a release with the patches merged (time  
consuming!).  Not to mention that you also have to deal with monotone  
and possibly quilt.  If you are brave enough though, you can download  
the org.NetBSD.src.atf-merge branch (also see [1] for details) and  
use the script in there to do the merge.  But it might not work on  
your computer, and if you just want to see how the thing works, it  
will be unnecessary painful.

To make things simpler for you (and the whole point of this post ;-),  
I have uploaded some release builds with all the changes integrated  
to [2].  These releases are built from today's current sources, and  
I'll probably be refreshing them periodically.  At the moment I have  
only uploaded releases for the machines I can try, but if you really  
want to use this on some other specific platform, drop me a note and  
I'll prepare a release build for it.

For the best experience, install these releases from scratch.  Be  
sure to select the 'tests.tgz' set in sysinst.  Then, once the system  
is installed and minimally configured, you can inspect the contents  
of /usr/tests, and end up running 'atf-run' in that directory.

In case you want to upgrade a machine to these releases, the only  
sets that differ from unmodified current are (at the moment)  
base.tgz, comp.tgz, man.tgz and the new tests.tgz (and man.tgz is  
still not of much use).  Upgrading these alone should be enough (if  
your system is already current), but I don't recommend this of  
course.  If you want to update, do a full upgrade following the  
traditional procedure.

Have fun!

1: http://www.NetBSD.org/~jmmv/atf/
2: ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/jmmv/NetBSD-atf-merged/

-- 
Julio M. Merino Vidal <jmmv84@gmail.com>