[Libcdio-devel] Test suite

[Leon Merten Lohse]

Good morning,

to prevent further regressions in the CD-Text code, I have decided to
write a dedicated test case for it and not hide it within the cue test
case anymore.
I takes me a great deal of effort to understand what is actually
happening in the test directory. This is partially because I am
fairly new to autotools but also because of the overall complexity of
the test suite.

Let me try to express, what I learned so far and comment on it.

There are 4 places for tests:
1) scripts in test/
2) executables in test/
3) executables in test/drivers/
4) executables in examples/

Although all executables in 4) get executed, all but 3 return SKIP when
no disc is inserted. Looking into the sources in examples/, it does not
look like those are actually meant to be tests. The result merely
indicates if execution fails or not.

There is a test/data directory. Still, much of the data lies in the
test/ directory.
What distinguishes executables in test/ and test/drivers? They both
seem to test the drivers.

Now my biggest question. Why are all the test sources and scripts
generated from .in templates? Don't we have `make' for source files?
For the scripts its even worse because the generated files are not
necessarily executable. I found numerous attempts to make them
executable in different places. Can we not use AM_TESTS_ENVIRONMENT to
define the environment used by the scripts? That would also save the
trouble with the executable bits.
Is it a standard practice to use .in templates for such purposes at
all? Is there a reason for all this or is it simply `historic'?

Please excuse my naive questions.

Best regards
Leon