Chapter 4. Writing Conformance tests

Table of Contents
4.1. Introduction
4.2. What to test for?
4.3. Running the tests in Wine
4.4. Cross-compiling the tests with MinGW
4.5. Building and running the tests on Windows
4.6. Inside a test
4.7. Writing good error messages
4.8. Handling platform issues

4.1. Introduction

The Windows API follows no standard, it is itself a de facto standard, and deviations from that standard, even small ones, often cause applications to crash or misbehave in some way.

The question becomes, "How do we ensure compliance with that standard?" The answer is, "By using the API documentation available to us and backing that up with conformance tests." Furthermore, a conformance test suite is the most accurate (if not necessarily the most complete) form of API documentation and can be used to supplement the Windows API documentation.

Writing a conformance test suite for more than 10000 APIs is no small undertaking. Fortunately it can prove very useful to the development of Wine way before it is complete.