darcs new testing interface

Question

I'm following the GettingStarted guide and when I run 'cabal test' and got this message:

Deprecated: "Please use the new testing interface instead!"

What is the new testing interface?

Answer 1

This message is actually from cabal, not darcs, and is referring to the cabal testing interface.

Most Haskell projects include a file Setup.hs or Setup.lhs that cabal runs in order to build the project. Usually it's sufficient to just call the default Distribution.Simple.defaultMain, but UserHooks in the cabal library defines many hooks to extend cabal's default behavior. One of those hooks is runTests, and this used to be the only way to tell Cabal about the package's test suite. However runTests is now deprecated in favor of the test suite section of the cabal package file. darcs's Setup.lhs file overrides the runTests hook, which triggers the deprecation warning.

As a darcs user, you don't need to worry about this message. If you're interested in contributing to the darcs project, fixing this should be relatively straightforward and I'm sure the patches would be gratefully accepted.