part the first: background (I seem to have lost any ability to precis things - I blame building 109 gnome-3/related packages)
For a lot of packages, we have the stock: "To test the results, issue: make check." Personally, I very rarely test packages in my own after-LFS builds (dhcp/dhclient, gpg, and a few exotic audio libs [libsamplerate, libsndfile, fftw]). I sometimes run the testsuite for others when I first build them, but in general it doesn't seem to buy me anything and often it's clearly aimed at the developer (yes, I spent *hours* running the gimp-print tests when I started out, but they never told me whether that version would actually work for me!). For editing, things are different. If there is a testsuite, I run it unless the noted dependencies for this are too obscure for me. From time to time, I see errors that google makes me think are 'mine, all mine!' and probably should not be noted. Other times they are known, sometimes with workarounds. But now that I've been looking at gnome-3 I see an *awful* lot of 'make check' results that only run tests on the translations to ensure they are valid XML, occasionally with a check that all of the translations are used. This sort of test is clearly only useful for the upstream developer or maintainer, and sometimes it's clear that they don't bother to run it. part the second: questions on testing 1. Where a testsuite is designed to be used by the upstream developers and doesn't compile any test programs, should we even mention it, or should we add some boilerplate like "the testsuite is intended for the package's developers" ? 2. Is it worth differentiating the varieties of no-testsuite packages ? Some don't know what to do for 'make check', others happily run through all their subdirectories doing nothing.? ĸen - currently running metacity as his wm : can't say I like it, but it's usable. The wallpaper (sundown dunes) with an old version of xsnow running in front of it amuses me. Perhaps I'm already too far gone for this caper. -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
