[Mulgara-dev] Mulgara tests

[Paul Gearon]

Just a heads up: If you're trying to run the Mulgara tests at the
moment, some of them will fail.

Some explanation...

In case no one ever noticed, Mulgara uses the JUnit testing framework
to perform as many integration tests as it does "unit" tests. For good
or ill, these tests *are* valuable (though perhaps a different build
target may be more appropriate?) so there has never been a push to
change this.

Over the weekend I noticed that 6 tests were failing on my local
system: 4 in org.mulgara.itql, and 2 in org.mulgara.resolver.http.
Having a lot of changes I naturally assumed it was my fault, though I
couldn't figure out how. Well it turns out that the problem wasn't
caused by me.

Some of the tests download RDF files from Dublin Core, using the DC
namespace. Of course, this presumes that the tests are run while the
computer is online, but that's a (surprisingly?) reasonably safe bet
these days. This is an example of those integration tests I just
mentioned. Well, it seems that dublincore.org is offline at the
moment. Apparently they were unaware of this and are now looking at
it.

I'm leaving the tests as they are for the moment. This means failures,
but they're relatively well contained, and they should "just work"
again as soon as DC get back online. There *are* ways around this, but
the effort is disproportionate to the benefit, so I don't see the
point (at least for now).

Regards,
Paul