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Date: Wed, 07 Dec 2016 20:57:14 +0000
Subject: Improvements to the PHP test suite
From: daniel@honestempire.com (Daniel Morris)

Since around 2011 there's been an item on the ideas list on php.net:
(https://wiki.php.net/ideas/runtests) to improve the PHP test suite, I
was thinking as one of my first major contributions I would like to take
a stab at this, there's no upwards of 11,000 tests as compared to the
8000 or so when the idea was originally proposed, and it looks like some
work was initially started but it's likely now outdated and I think it
would be better to start from a blank sheet.

Would this be of interest for 7.2? My main goals would be to maintain
backwards compatibility with all the existing tests, allow it to be run
on the existing CI infrastructure, be cross-platform, and for it to be
part of the internals repository, with initial work being done outside
of the repository with a view to merging for the 7.2 release.

A question I have is that is it better that it continues to be a written
in PHP, or is the internals team open to perhaps writing the test runner
in another language, keeping the same flags that run-tests.php currently
uses, but choosing a language which could improve the performance of the
suite.

Thoughts appreciated always.
Daniel Morris.

--
Daniel Morris
daniel@honestempire.com