Re: subversion client test suite

On Wed, 7 Mar 2001, Mo DeJong wrote:

 [ Lee Burgess wrote: ]
> > I think this itself is a bit extreme. If we should decide to write
> > the test suite in Bash, does that mean we need to include Bash in the
> > source tree?
>
> This has nothing to do with your scripting language of choice. It has
> everything to do with bootstrapping a tool's build process. If I try to
> install subversion of a fresh Solaris box, you can be sure there ain't
> gonna be a recent version of Perl, Python, Tcl, Berkeley DB, or whatever
> on it. I know it "works for you" on a Linux box with all the most recent
> updates. That is not the point.

 I agree with Lee on this; we must be able to assume some things. So what if
the "fresh Solaris" doesn't have [our test script language of choice]
installed, they just won't be able to run the test suite.

 The test suite needs to use one of the languages mentioned and we cannot
have that language as part of the source tree.

> This is why autoconf is written in brain dead sh. It does not use bash
> features because bash can not be depended on to exist everywhere.

Yes, but autoconf (or at least configure scripts) is meant to run for the
program in question to compile/build/install. In my eyes that is a somewhat
more important issue for most tarball downloaders than running the test suite
is.

> Am I saying a test suite should be written in sh? No, clearly not. But if
> we are going to depend on something, the toplevel configure should take
> care of it.

... and what if [Perl/Python/Tcl/sh] or a combination of them aren't present
in your build system? We can hardly fail miserably since we can compile,
build and run fine without them (not without sh though).

I'd say we're fine to output a nice message saying "you need at least version
X of language Y to run the test suite" instead. We could have a warning
displayed in the configure script.

-- 
      Daniel Stenberg - http://daniel.haxx.se - +46-705-44 31 77
   ech`echo xiun|tr nu oc|sed 'sx\([sx]\)\([xoi]\)xo un\2\1 is xg'`ol