Anatomy of a Horde test suite - II

This morning I completed the next step on the journey through Horde's test suites and added the description of the AllTests.php file to the wiki page. I am not going to copy the complete text here but instead focus on the use cases for this file as I still have a few question to the audience below.

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AllTests.php is the only mandatory requirement for a Horde test suite. Everything else is optional but there has to be an AllTests.php file which serves as an entry point into the test suite.

This is the functionality expected from the file:

1. It must collect all tests of the test suite.
2. It must allow to retrieve all tests of the suite via Horde_Xyz_AllTests::suite().
3. It must allow running the test suite via phpunit AllTests.php.
4. It must allow running the test suite via php AllTests.php.

The Horde_Test package already delivers a boilerplate AllTests.php class in framework/Test/lib/Horde/Test/AllTests.php and deriving an AllTests.php for a standard test suite becomes rather simple. The full code for this is presented on the wiki page and you can also look at an example from our repository.

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Now I wonder if the items listed above are in fact all the requirements we have for this file.

Requirements (1) and (2) are obvious as this is functionality needed for our horde/framework/bin/test_framework helper that runs all framework tests. Though I assume nobody uses this one on a regular basis at the moment.

But I noticed that (3) does not work out of the box with the current PHPUnit. This led to a pull request as it definitely should (and can) work.

I usually run the tests with a rather long command line that ultimately boils down to phpunit Horde_Xyz_AllTests AllTests.php which is tied to a shortcut in Emacs. As the Lisp code I use for that extracts the class name automatically I never noticed that a plain phpunit AllTests.php does not work.

So are most people using php AllTests.php? How do you run the test suites or would like to run them? Can I get some feedback on this (either here, on IRC or via tweet)?

Anything additional I missed about the requirements for the AllTests.php file?

Next in the series will be on autoloading which should allow me to also look at the problems we still have with that in the application components.