Re: GNU Coding Standard compliance

[Micah Cowan]

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Eric Blake wrote:
> I'm trying to package wget-1.11.3 for cygwin.  But you have several GNU
> Coding Standard compliance problems that is making this task more
> difficult than it should be.  GCS requires that your testsuite be run by
> 'make check', but yours is a no-op.   Instead, you provide 'make test',
> but that fails to compile if you use a VPATH build.  And even when using
> an in-tree build, it fails as follows:
> 
> ./Test-proxied-https-auth.px && echo && echo
> /bin/sh: ./Test-proxied-https-auth.px: No such file or directory
> 
> After commenting that line out, the following tests are also missing:
> 
>     ./Test-proxy-auth-basic.px
>     ./Test-N-current-HTTP-CD.px
> 
> Test-N-HTTP-Content-Disposition.px fails, since it didn't add the
> --content-disposition flag to the wget invocation.
> 
> Several Test--spider-* tests fail, because an expected error code of 256
> is impossible (exit status is truncated to 8 bits).
> 
> Also, your hand-rolled Makefile.in don't support --datarootdir.  I'm not
> sure whether you are interested in migrating to using Automake, which
> would solve a number of these issues; let me know if you would be
> interested in such a patch.

We actually have already migrated to Automake in the mainline revision,
which we forked some time ago. 1.11.x development has focused on
important bugfixes only.

The issues with the tests are known, and documented (see tests/README).
They are provided "as-is"; a work-in-progress, and not really expected
to be terribly useful. I'm actually working on improving this process
right now (and in fact, the current mainline is already much-improved in
this regard, thanks to some recent commits).

In the mainline repository, "make check" works as expected (modulo some
remaining issues with the tests, such as intermittent failures due to
the fact that all the tests use the same web-server port for testing,
and don't always wait quite long enough for reuse; I'll have that fixed
soon).

I would definitely recommend that "make test" be abandoned altogether;
alternatively, you could probably modify tests/Makefile.in to match
current mainline, which now runs a "run-px" script, rather than all
those hideous ./Test-foo.px && echo && echo lines in Makefile.in proper
(the tests from mainline should run fine on 1.11.3, I believe). It would
still need some work, as I mention, to really be reliable, but at least
there aren't glaring issues with broken and missing tests (and it runs
via the expected make target).

Good luck with the packaging.

- --
HTH,
Micah J. Cowan
Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer,
and GNU Wget Project Maintainer.
http://micah.cowan.name/
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