Re: [PATCH] Testsuite: use $SHELL to run tests which are shell scripts.

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Stefano Lattarini wrote on Wed, Sep 01, 2010 at 10:23:48PM CEST:
> Before this patch, to force the consistent use of (say) ksh as the shell,
> I had to resort to something like:
>   $ CONFIG_SHELL=/bin/ksh /bin/ksh ./configure CONFIG_SHELL=/bin/ksh
>   $ make
>   $ make (re)check TEST_LOG_COMPILER=/bin/ksh
> or even, for non-GNU makes:
>   $ make (re)check TEST_LOG_COMPILER=/bin/ksh 
> AM_MAKEFLAGS='TEST_LOG_COMPILER=/bin/ksh'
> where now I can simply do:
>   $ CONFIG_SHELL=/bin/ksh /bin/ksh ./configure CONFIG_SHELL=/bin/ksh
>   $ make
>   $ make (re)check
> 
> OK for maint?

Well, the only qualm I have with this is that it will in the long run
make it less likely that we are portable to /bin/sh too.  Not a problem
per se, but being able to do
  cd tests
  ./foo.test    (or $srcdir/foo.test)

to quickly run a test interactively may then expose a different behavior
than ordinary 'make check' would.  We could adjust the documentation to
state that in order to run tests manually, one should do
  $good_shell ./foo.test

but if you haven't used CONFIG_SHELL for configure (which is the case
for virtually all users), they might not even know the value of
$good_shell that would be used during 'make check'.  Could cause
slightly less reliably reproducible bug reports.

The patch has obvious advantages though.  How to best ameliorate the
disadvantages?

Thanks,
Ralf

> From cd63d7bb6e08879a3593ca21619dd0a588926b1b Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> From: Stefano Lattarini <address@hidden>
> Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2010 22:14:24 +0200
> Subject: [PATCH] Testsuite: use $SHELL to run tests which are shell scripts.
> 
> * tests/Makefile.am (TEST_LOG_COMPILER): Define to $(SHELL), so
> that test script are run by default with the best shell detected
> at configure time, rather than with default system shell.
> (TEST_EXTENSIONS): Defined to `.test', for clarity.