test/README-TestSuite

This README file describes the files and directories related to the Python test
suite under the current 'test' directory.

o dotest.py

  Provides the test driver for the test suite.  To invoke it, cd to the 'test'
  directory and issue the './dotest.py' command or './dotest.py -v' for more
  verbose output.  '.dotest.py -h' prints out the help messge.

  A specific naming pattern is followed by the .py script under the 'test'
  directory in order to be recognized by 'dotest.py' test driver as a module
  which implements a test case, namely, Test*.py.

o lldbtest.py

  Provides an abstract base class of lldb test case named 'TestVase', which in
  turn inherits from Python's unittest.TestCase.  The concrete subclass can
  override lldbtest.TestBase in order to inherit the common behavior for
  unittest.TestCase.setUp/tearDown implemented in this file.

  To provide a test case, the concrete subclass provides methods whose names
  start with the letters test.  For more details about the Python's unittest
  framework, go to http://docs.python.org/library/unittest.html. 

  ./command_source/TestCommandSource.py provides a simple example of test case
  which overrides lldbtest.TestBase to exercise the lldb's 'command source'
  command.  The subclass should override the attribute 'mydir' in order for the
  runtime to locate the individual test cases when running as part of a large
  test suite or when running each test case as a separate Python invocation.

  The doc string provides more details about the setup required for running a
  test case on its own.  To run the whole test suite, 'dotest.py' is all you
  need to do.

o subdirectories of 'test'

  Most of them predate the introduction of the python test suite and contain
  example C/C++/ObjC source files which get compiled into executables which are
  to be exercised by the debugger.

  For such subdirectory which has an associated Test*.py file, it was added as
  part of the Python-based test suite to test lldb functionality.

  Some of the subdirectories, for example, the 'help' subdirectory, do not have
  C/C++/ObjC source files; they were created to house the Python test case which
  does not involve lldb reading in an executable file at all.

o dotest.pl

  In case you wonder, there is also a 'dotest.pl' perl script file.  It was
  created to visit each Python test case under the specified directory and
  invoke Python's builtin unittest.main() on each test case.

  It does not take advantage of the test runner and test suite functionality
  provided by Python's unitest framework.  Its existence is because we want a
  different way of running the whole test suite.  As lldb and the Python test
  suite become more reliable, we don't expect to be using 'dotest.pl' anymore.