Yes, I'm aware of the issue with xml comments. I don't really know how to fix it though. The problem with what you propose is that it adds a very undesirable piece of complexity to ktest. What if later we want to make a way to call krun on more than one file? Then we would specify something like:

<krun-option name="some-file" />

and it would break. The reason I have it the way it is now is because ktest is now strictly pass-through: what it gets is exactly what it passes to the process to be run. This simplicity of design will prevent us from running into this type of problem later, not to mention it will greatly decrease confusion to users. Yeah, it interferes with comments, but /**/ can't be nested in most programming languages. Programmers are used to modifying code that's commented out if they really have to.