Test results currently look something like this:
t/foo.t................. ok t/bar.t................. ok t/baz.t................. 23/? # Failed test at t/baz.t line 9 # Looks like you failed 2 tests out of 23 t/baz.t................. Dubious, test ...
Why do we do this instead of outputting TAP (using the proposed YAML diagnostics)?
ok 1 - t/foo.t
ok 2 - t/bar.t
not ok 3 - t/baz.t
---
failed:
- 2
- 11
...
And we could even add diagnostics for the non-failing tests. This could be an alternate output, but now instead of external tools having to try and parse our ad-hoc Test::Harness output, we could have an alternate machine read-able output that those tools could use. Now if only we had a useful way to read that output ...
Of course, this would be optional output, not the default. I think this could simplify a lot of "meta" testing issues we seem to have. Of course, you could say "but the new Test::Harness provides that information anyway!" The problem is that it's not easy to stream this data to a remote machine or persist it for later. Being able to persist it as TAP would be useful (TAP::Harness::Archive is a different attempt to solve a similar problem).