[darcs-users] darcs patch: Do not use Perl test harness. (and 3 more)

[David Roundy]

On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 11:09 PM, Trent W. Buck wrote:
> And easier to understand.  When I look at some of the darcs tests, I
> can't tell whether the script does a dumb thing because the author
> didn't know any better, or because the obvious way isn't portable.  For
> example, it would never have occurred to me that "fgrep" might work on a
> system where "grep -F" does not.

Precisely.  I have the same problem, as does anyone contemplating
fixing a confusing test.

>> And it would allow windows tests to be run by that large fraction of
>> users who are unwilling to install msys or cygwin.
>
> Is this the only impediment to Windows users running the tests?  I'm on
> Debian and I never bother to run the functional tests, because I expect
> the buildbots to do that for me.

If you make changes to darcs, you absolutely should not rely on the
buildbot, as the buildbot network is very incomplete.  It's possible
that your machine happens to be identical to a buildbot in every
respect, but it's definitely not certain (e.g. which version of
libcurl you have installed, whether you also have haskeline installed,
or libwww, or curses-dev, etc).  Also because changes only hit the
buildbot after I've run the tests and pushed them, which means you're
adding to my workload when tests fail.

David