Deprecate in favor of tasty?

[Bodigrim]

This package is on life support for at least five years and requires regular bumps from Hackage trustees to be compatible with the latest ecosystem. It's only a matter of time when revisions would no longer be enough. I'd like to mark it deprecated in favor of tasty (since migration from test-framework to tasty is mostly a matter of changing imports) to give a clear signal to clients that it's time to move on.

[sol]

For what reason should we specifically recommend tasty over hspec or HTF from a repository that is hosted under the haskell organization?

[chessai]

Right. I don't think we should recommend a single thing, but just deprecate and say "use something else", possibly with a list of alternatives.

[sol]

As long as that list is ordered by popularity I'm fine 🤣

[Bodigrim]

@sol as I said, that's because "migration from test-framework to tasty is mostly a matter of changing imports". tasty was built as a successor to test-framework, and design decisions are very similar. With all due respect, migrating to hspec requires a complete rewrite, but I don't mind mentioning it as an option.

[sol]

@Bodigrim not putting unnecessary burden on existing users of test-framework makes sense. Here is my perspective:

• test-framework has been stable for years, I don't see a compelling technical reason for urging people that are happy with test-framework to move.
• Looking at the commit history, maintenance overhead seem to be pretty low. I'm happy to take over maintenance if that helps. **
• Competition is a good thing. Lack of competition leads to lower quality and hurts the end user (we have a lot of historic evidence for this).

** Conflict of interests: I'm also the maintainer of hspec, but I've been maintaining HUnit for the last 7 years without biasing it towards hspec in any way.

[andreasabel]

There are tons of dependencies still on this package, see https://packdeps.haskellers.com/reverse/test-framework. So, no to deprecation. I see test-framework as simply a stable package that doesn't get any new features. Users that want new features can be directed to tasty, hspec or any other alternative...