Test::Harness now includes a powerful development tool to help
programmers work with automated tests. The prove utility runs
test files against the harness, like a "make test", but with many
advantages:
prove is designed as a development tool
Perl users typically run the test harness through a makefile via
"make test". That's fine for module distributions, but it's
suboptimal for a test/code/debug development cycle.prove is granular
prove lets your run against only the files you want to check.
Running "prove t/live/ t/master.t" checks every *.t in t/live, plus
t/master.t.prove has an easy verbose mode
To get full test program output from "make test", you must set
"HARNESS_VERBOSE" in the environment. prove has a "-v" option.prove can run under taint mode
prove's "-T" runs your tests under "perl -T".prove can shuffle tests
You can use prove's "--shuffle" option to try to excite problems
that don't show up when tests are run in the same order every time.Not everything is a module
More and more users are using Perl's testing tools outside the
context of a module distribution, and may not even use a makefile at
all.
Prove requires Pod::Usage, which is standard after Perl 5.004.
I'm very excited about prove, and hope that developers will begin
adopting it to their coding cycles. I welcome your comments at
andy@petdance.com.
There are also some minor bug fixes in Test::Harness itself, listed
below in the 2.31_* notes.