I am looking for Gilles

@AlexanderMills I'm here

@Gilles thanks I have a test runner in development, it will attempt to support running tests in all languages.

I want to minimize the amount of (complex) work the users of my library have to do

A 1 line hashbang would be the most I could expect; it's a real shame we can't put more arguments in there. But that's the way it is. I also don't think env vars will work. The only true generic solution I can think of is to expect users to include a bash script in every directory of files. The bash script tells the test runner how to run the files in the same directory.

what do you mean by “in all languages”?

I mean my test runner will be able to run tests written in any language. The test runner launches child processes, and parsers stdout from the child processes.

Test Anything Protocol (stdout) is sent from child processes

So my test runner has to be generic in that way, and it needs to know how to execute a file. Ideally there would be a hashbang with all the arguments there. But I can't do that. So instead, I can have the users include a shell script in the same directory as the "real" file to execute. I execute the bash script instead, which will execute the real file.

then I think your test runner should have some kind of configuration file where people can specify interpreters. Either allow specifying command line options and environment variables for each interpreter, or document how to write wrapper scripts.

Your users may want to test with multiple versions of the same interpreter, so “it's a mocha script” doesn't give enough information to know how to run a script.

right, like Python 2 vs 3?

@AlexanderMills or even python 2.6 vs python 2.7

or ironpython vs cpython, etc.

I see. I was thinking of a config file like that. But I need to map executable script <----> file.

Unless you can think of something better ATM, the best thing I can think of is - the users may have several directories of files, let's say 10 directories, some nested some not. The user will be expected to include at least one bash script that tells the test runner how to run the associated files. This reduces the amount of the work the user has to do.