On Fri, Jun 11, 2004 at 09:36:41PM +0100, Adrian Howard wrote: > What does an empty test file give you over an absent one?
Cleaner build system. You simply say, for every Perl file, run pod2test to build a test file, then run all the test files. Something like: %.pm.t: %.pm pod2test $< $@ test: *.pm.t perl -MTest::Harness -e 'runtests(@ARGV)' $^ The alternative is to figure out which modules contain tests every time you run make, which requires extra code and is less efficient as well. You could instead maintain a list (in your Makefile) of which modules have tests, but ewww. As a general principle, there should be a file to represent every piece of work that make has to do--even if it is just a dummy--so that it knows when the work has already been done. I suppose you could say that I'm overly concerned with efficiency and I should just rebuild all the test files every time I run the tests. That may be a fair argument. Andrew