Re: Removing cppunit

On Fri, 2007-04-13 at 13:23 +1000, Robert Collins wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-04-12 at 21:01 -0600, Alex Rousskov wrote:>
> >
> > Running "make check" (or whatever it is) would run cppunit test cases
> > if somebody has cppunit installed and should skip them (with a warning)
> > if somebody does not have cppunit installed.
> >
> > If there is a special make target to force running cppunit test cases,
> > that target will fail if there is no cppunit installed.
>
> I think that make check should error if cppunit is not available:
> cppunit is core infrastructure for the test suite these days, and 'make
> check' cannot deliver robust results in its absence.

I am not sure whether "make check" semantics (in Automake world) is that
narrow, but I am sure of two things:

1) Many packages use "make check" or "make distcheck" without knowing
anything about cppunit or any other form of unit testing. The "standard"
installation sequence is:

        ./configure
        make
        make check
        make install

Certainly, the above should not fail if cppunit is not available.

2) It is common to skip test cases that cannot be tested in a given
environment. For example, Perl modules often skip POD test cases if some
POD module is not installed.

> cppunit is not hard to install, even less so now than when we added it
> to the squid code base.

That is good, but I do not think we should require it. Cppunit is a
developer tool. "Make check" is a user-level reassurance that the
package was built correctly. If cppunit is installed, "make check"
should use it (although it would be nice to disable those checks with an
environment variable or some such). If cppunit is not available, "make
check" should succeed with a warning.

These are just me thoughts and recommendations. I am fine with requiring
cppunit for "make check" if folks think that is a good idea.

Thank you,

Alex.
Received on Thu Apr 12 2007 - 22:02:55 MDT