GSoC 2022: Week 3 report

I was expecting to work on the new interface, but I had to solve some issues, namely the return type of the test functions and the configuration file.

Now, the test functions do not have to return a Result, and instead can unwrap the errors, which cause a panic which is captured by the test runner. They also can use the standard assertion macros (assert! and assert_eq!). All of this provide a more idiomatic way to write test functions.

As for the configuration file, it will allow to execute opt-in tests, for example posix_fallocate, which is available on FreeBSD, but doesn’t work on all file systems.

Finally, my mentor @asomers has implemented a way to collect the tests automatically, by using the inventory crate, without having to manually create a test group and a test case. I originally suggested to use this crate (or linkme) to collect the tests, but we were worried of how it could be hard to implement, besides the fact that there were some concerns at the time on the underlying mecanism of these crates.