Introducing Kyua

[Julio Merino <jmmv84%gmail.com@localhost>]

Dear users of ATF,

For quite a bit of time, I've been realizing that the ATF tools have
some serious design flaws that prevent us from implementing some
highly desired features.  These features include, for example:
parallel execution, historical test data and something as simple as
making "atf-run | atf-report" deal with its exit code correctly.  The
current separation of atf-run and atf-report and the "weird"
communication formats between them make it really hard to implement
these features.

A separate pain point is that the ATF distribution is a huge beast
that provides lots of components, and all these components are
interrelated in non-clear ways.  As you may have noticed, I've been
trying real hard to clean this mess up during the last few releases
but my efforts haven't been that successful... the interdependencies
are so deeply buried that taking them apart is near to impossible, and
all the recent changes have not done much to improve clarity.

Lastly, the entry barrier to contributions to ATF is too high at the
moment (and I can certainly be blamed for that!): the code is mostly
undocumented, I have been using rare and unpopular tools (e.g.
Monotone) and the bug tracking system is suboptimal (hosted in my slow
home machine; unstable, unreliable).

Due to all the reasons above, I've been toying with the idea of
rearchitecting ATF from the ground up for quite a while.  And for the
last month and a half, I have been doing exactly this.

Welcome to Kyua.

Kyua[1] is a project to address all the issues above.  The project is
intended to replace components from ATF bit by bit and only when the
new components are truly ready.

Don't panic!  ATF is here to stay for a while.  The Kyua code is still
very incomplete and I am not really sure where it is going yet.  ATF
will keep seeing development until Kyua can phase parts of ATF out (if
ever).  And even when this happens, components will be replaced one at
a time and should have a low impact on you.  At the moment, consider
Kyua as an experiment and playground for new ideas.

So, without further ado, the new project, alongside a nicer
description of its purpose and goals, is here:

    http://code.google.com/p/kyua/

Yes, you read right.  Kyua uses off-the-shelf popular tools (in
particular Subveresion), something intended to lower the entry barrier
to contributions and users.

Hope you appreciate the cleanup efforts going in this direction.
Comments welcome, of course.

Thanks for reading and enjoy!

1: If you are wondering why I'm not simply naming this ATF 2.x, it's
only because I have never liked the ATF acronym due to the
connotations it has in the U.S.  I now have a chance to change the
name, so I'm doing so.  But you should think of Kyua as the second
version of ATF, just with a different name and with a clear transition
path.

PS: Kyua has been announced for the first time in NYCBSDCon 2010.  The
video of the presentation should be available soon; it includes
content covering Kyua.

-- 
Julio Merino