[tap-l] Inter-stream punctuation

[Eric Wilhelm]

# from Adrian Howard
# on Tuesday 20 March 2007 06:22 am:

>On 20 Mar 2007, at 12:22, Andy Armstrong wrote:
>[snip]
>> I think all the TAP grammar would need would be 'begin' and 'end'
<snip>
>> It doesn't then matter how many test scripts that output comes from.
>[snip]

>But doesn't that force us to do all the foo tests, then all the bar  
>tests. I'd like to feed them both to a TAP consumer at the same time.

If you want to have hierarchical tests which are sent in arbitrary 
order, that has to be completely different than "multiple pieces of tap 
strung together."

The protocol needs to preserve the simplicity of an single feed.  This 
allows the harness and other tools to easily juggle multiple feeds.  If 
we put juggling in the protocol, the tools are then potentially 
juggling jugglers.

Where your use-case is an optimization (ala LWP::Parallel), it either 
belongs in a parallelized harness or you need a two-step producer of 
some sort (e.g. an aggregating proxy-consumer does the network pulls 
and pretends to be a serial, concatenating producer.)  In either case, 
the feed needs to be a single test.

Of course, to get the responsiveness that you want via a proxy-consumer, 
the proxy would have to start all of the feeds and do some math with 
the plans and test numbers.  A parallelized harness would probably be 
simpler.

--Eric
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