I guess I don't see what if anything in this pull we would want to keep
if we went to a small module approach?
Maybe you could explain that?
Sure, any time. I assume you haven't been following the testsuite discussions for a while, where people complain about this and that not working, so I will try to sum up the issues with the current master's testsuite.
1) This pull IS the small module approach. The only thing remaining is to move the tests.
I think this single argument makes it a good candidate for merging.
2) You may consider it "livable for a while", but you'll leave it once AS 7.1 is released. AS7 will get productized to EAP, and QA dept will use the testsuite for a decade. "livable for a while" is not the condition we may let it in.
3) Workdir moved. Running it in user.dir leaves files there.
4) Introduced properties which carry important directories to the tests.
5) Fixed tests which assumed running in testsuite/integration to use those properties.
6) Other properties necessary for product testing are propagated to the tests.
7) Tests grouping made possible. One of requirements was to run smoke tests by default... well, this is described below.
8) pom.xml's are cleaned up a bit by removing unnecessary classpath stuff which is needed in master's TS.
9) pom.xml's are cleaned up a bit by using maven's inheritance more.
10) Ant scripts use dir properties which makes them easier to maintain & move around, and use from various modules without passing additional arguments.
11) ./build.sh -DskipTests works.
12) Multiple surefire executions when -Dtest=... is set are supressed.
13) Created integration testsuite sub-modules and moved the executions there. <------- This part is the MORE SMALL MODULES btw.
Probably I missed some things.
Anyway, this is the base for EAP's testsuite, i.e. for fulfilling QA dept's requirements. Current master's testsuite can't fullfill these requirements. I see no point in delaying merging this since there are not much possibilities how to satisfy those needs, this is the best I can come up with.
Once more - it's half way to "more small modules".