Re: subversion client test suite

Daniel Stenberg <daniel@haxx.se> writes:
> ... 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.

+1 on that.

We all agree that these criteria are important:

   1. The test suite should be maintainable. It should be easy to
      read, and to add new tests.

   2. The test suite should be portable.

Unfortunately, these criteria may conflict a bit, so we have to
prioritize. Perl and Python probably meet criterion 1 (assuming we
use them right, of course), but fall short on criterion 2.

However, I'd like to point out that either of them is *more* portable
than plain Bourne shell, for our purposes, because Bourne does not run
natively on Windows. Cygwin doesn't count -- we don't currently
require Cygwin to build Subversion on Windows. And while I don't know
this from personal experience, I suspect that Perl (and maybe Python?)
is more portable to the Mac than Bourne shell.

So moving from our current Bourne script to either Perl or Python is
already a step up in portability.

-K
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:25 2006