Re: patch #1 - towards a generic backend datastore

[Mark D. Baushke]

Mel Hatzis <address@hidden> writes:

> Mike M. Volokhov wrote:
> > On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 22:50:16 -0800
> > Mel Hatzis <address@hidden> wrote:
> > 
> > [snip]
> > 
> >>OK, I'll go ahead and commit to the mainline tomorrow morning (PST).
> >>Note that I ran the changes through a fairly comprehensive set of
> >>regression tests (which I put together) and they appear to be sound.
> > 
> > 
> > Wow. I'd love to see such tests in tree so as when huge changes come,
> > it's sometimes bit difficult to found underwater stones. Many thanks!
> 
> If there's general interest in incorporating the test suite I have,
> I'd be happy to try and set something up.
> 
> There's a perl component in it though...for setting up a test database
> against which the regression tests are run. I'm not sure how people
> feel about adding a perl dependency to the mix.
> 
> My original idea was to have the tests run via a 'make test, but this
> was not possible since GNATS needs to be (partly) installed in order
> to run...the binaries all have a hard-wired reference to the 'databases'
> file. We could fairly easily overcome this by modifying the binaries
> to allow the databases file to be supplied...either by environment
> variable or command line option (or both).
> 
> The perl requirement could perhaps, be resolved, by simply committing
> the generated database to the mix.

Other GNU projects have been known to have dependencies on external
tools such as Tcl,Tk,expect or even some PERL code. The key is to ensure
that the test suite is separable from the software distribution. For
example, see how gcc is available as gcc-core-<rev>.tar.bz2 and
gcc-testsuite-<rev>.tar.bz2

        -- Mark