On 8 Nov 2009, at 04:20, Paul Davis wrote:
Well, the lack of distcheck actually running check hasn't appeared to
cause any sort of issue thus far.
Apart from the build not running the tests, which is antithetical to
the point of having them.
Teach all test code about the difference between $(top_srcdir) and
$(top_builddir) or punt and just run the tests as part of distsign
when the test code runs with a unified filesystem view.
Yes, the tests should know how to deal with VPATH builds.
I could be bothered to try and futz around with getting the tests to
run under distcheck, but I worry that the overheard is gonna start to
annoy anyone that feels like adding to them.
Let's get it working first, and then discuss ways of making it easier,
Its fairly arduous considering the use case is for people that want
to ./configure with a
build path outside of $(top_srcdir). And by that, I mean people that
want to run the test suite in that scenario.
Implicit is the suggestion that nobody actually does this.
Not running the tests
when we detect the VPATH build to me is AOK, as anyone doing the split
build can check separately.
Your assuming that this is possible.
Think about the scenario where a maintainer uploads a new version of
the CouchDB package for a distribution, and that package is then built
automatically on a number of architectures, either for, or by the end
users. In the situation where these builds require a VPATH (say,
because the sources are mounted on a read-only filesystem) then they
will be unable to install CouchDB.
Granted, if lots of people all of a sudden reply to this with a "Hey,
its absolutely necessary to run the test suite from the weird builds
we're doing" then I'll give it more weight, but I just don't see this
as very productive in the short, mid, or long term.
You're assuming an awful lot about how people build packages in the
wild.
Or in other words, "Fixing the build" could be "not running tests on
distcheck" or "fixing all tests to respect VPATH builds" one is
simple, the other is not.
And one is broken, and the other is not.
