When curl is built debug enabled, it offers a special kind of testing. The tests we call torture tests. Do not worry, it is not quite as grim as it may sound.
They verify that libcurl and curl exit paths work without any crash or memory leak happening,
The torture tests work like this:
- run the single test as-is first
- count the number of invoked fallible functions
- rerun the test once for every falling function call
- make each fallible function call return error, one by one
- verify that there is no leak or crash
- continue until all fallible functions have been made to fail
This way of testing can take a seriously long time. I advise you to switch off valgrind when trying this out.
If a single test fails, runtests.pl identifies exactly which "round" that
triggered the problem and by using the -t as shown, you can run a command
line that when invoked only fails that particular fallible function.
To make this way of testing a little more practical, the test suite also
provides a --shallow option. This lets the user set a maximum number of
fallible functions to fail per test case. If there are more invokes to fail
than is set with this value, the script randomly selects which ones to fail.
As a special feature, as randomizing things in tests can be uncomfortable, the
script uses a random seed based on year + month, so it remains the same for
each calendar month. Convenient, as if you rerun the same test with the same
--shallow value it runs the same random tests.
You can force a different seed with runtests' --seed option.