On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 7:18 PM, Peter Eisentraut <pete...@gmx.net> wrote: > I noticed again that make check in contrib doesn't work, so here is a > patch to fix it. Perhaps someone wants to fill in the Windows support > for it. Naturally, this works only for contrib itself, not for external > packages that use pgxs. > > A secondary issue that actually led to this: I was preparing a Debian > package for some module^Wextension^W^Hthing that uses pgxs. The Debian > packaging tools ("dh", to be exact, for the insiders) have this > convenience that by default they examine your makefile and execute the > standard targets, if found, in order. So it runs make all, make check, > which then fails because of > > check: > @echo "'make check' is not supported." > @echo "Do 'make install', then 'make installcheck' instead." > @exit 1 > > You can override this, but it still means that everyone who packages an > extension will have to re-figure this out. > > So while this message might be moderately useful (although I'm not sure > whether it's guaranteed that the suggestion will always work), I'd > rather get rid of it and not have a check target in the pgxs case.
I think it might be more useful to have a check target that actually succeeds, even if it does nothing useful. The argument that no check target at all is more useful than a check target that fails with a reasonably informative error message seems week to me. It's only going to be true if - as in the case you mention - external software is directly inspecting the makefile to figure out what to do. And that's a pretty weird case to optimize for. Maybe just change @exit 1 to @exit 0 and call it good? -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers