Autotest usage outside the Autoconf

[Alexey Mahotkin]

Hello,

I am trying to rewrite the CVS insanity.sh using the Autotest
infrastructure.  Everything goes slightly fine, and/but I have several
questions (quick search in list archives showed nothing from May):


Was it ever supposed that Autotest be used as general-purpose testing
framework?

If not, then why not?  :)

If yes, then does any other package besides Autoconf use the Autotest
for itself?

What is the policy of extending the Autotest?  I somewhat need more
testing variants: 

- writing idempotent test-cases is too hard sometimes: I'd like that
  the framework would not "now retry the test-cases verbosely and show
  you where it fails".  I'd like the test-cases be run verbosely, but
  hidden, for the first time;

- it is sometimes inconvenient that AT_CHECK() executes tests from
  scratch, and in fresh shell.  I'd like sometimes to execute one test
  in the same current directory that the previous test left it;

- it would be nice if the output sometimes be horizontal instead of
  the vertical; because CVS testsuite has lots of tiny tests which are
  too boring to write out as AT_SETUP/AT_CHECK/AT_CLEANUP each, but it
  would be great if it'd say something like:

  1: basic.at:5        1-a0, 1-a1, 1-a2, 1b, 1c, 1d, ok


- will ever the Autoconf add everything that is needed to the source
  tree?  I had to copy m4sh.m4 and m4sugar.m4 manually, and
  Makefile.am contains explicit commands for creating the `testsuite'
  file.  Also, what is the status of atgeneral.m4 and atspecific.m4?
  Which of them am I supposed to edit?

- more specific question: how could I use shell variables in file
  contents in AT_DATA?  It quotes the dollar-signs with backslashes...
  How to turn it off?



I am willing to offer any help: testing, discussing, writing
documentation, and extending.  I've already written >400 lines of
actual CVS ACL functionality tests, and more to come, so I am very
interested in improving the tool.


If someone could point out additional sources of information (if any),
it would be great.


Thanks,

--alexm