Hi Marc,

> I regret that I'm not able to get down into the guts of the Java code and
> help fix it, so, instead I moan ;-)

Thanks for moaning! XQUnit is still sth. we are heavily working on, so
any feedback is welcome.

> - assertions causing an NPE when an XQuery error is raised but no traceback
> that tells me what/where the error actually is. [ex1]

NPEs are usually serious bugs. We'll have a look at that.

> - assertions causing a failure/error reported, produce a test result but
> stop running further tests after the one that raises the error [ex2]

The reason is that maps are functions, and functions cannot be
compared. But the current version of the XQuery spec. will provide
support for comparing maps, so it's basically a matter of time when
the comparision of maps will be made possible. I'll dig into this one
as well; maybe it's not a big deal to provide an early yet stable
implementation.

> - Personally, I run the tests often (minutes rather than hours), and from
> the shell. The XML format feedback isn't very helpful.

It's probably not that trivial to find a proper textual representation
for everything that can be done with XQUnit. One thing you can do is
to send the output to a second BaseX call. The following command-line
code will only return the failures of your XML code:

  basex -t . | basex -i - //failure

Of course, you could also call a function that does some more
sophisticated stuff with your input.

Hope this helps,
Christian