1.8 make check failing in popen.test

[Rob Browning]

Right now 1.8's make check fails here in popen.test:

  Running popen.test
  FAIL: popen.test: open-input-pipe: echo hello

However, it's a fairly strange failure.  For example, if I run
./check-guile directly, everything's fine, but if I create a trivial
makefile containing "bar: ; ./check-guile" and then run "makefile -f
foo bar", the popen test fails again.

Also, if disable environments.test, everything's fine, i.e.:

  mkdir test-suite/tests.disabled
  mv test-suite/tests/environments.test test-suite/tests.disabled/
  make check

However, if I put environments.test back and disable these tests
instead:

  r4rs.test          ramap.test   receive.test  threads.test
  r5rs_pitfall.test  reader.test  regexp.test

then make check also runs correctly.  So it's not specifically
environments.test.

By adding some display statements to popen.test, it looks like the
fundamental cause of the failure is the fact that in those cases,
(open-input-pipe "echo hello") is returning an empty port.

Does anyone have any idea what might be going on?

Also, while looking around, I noticed that many of our tests don't
place themselves in a their own test module, and that raised two
questions:

  1) Should they (to limit the chance that one test might affect
     another inadvertently)?

  2) Is there any reason I shouldn't consider just reworking the
     scheme level tests to run each foo.test in a separate Guile
     process?

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org; previously @cs.utexas.edu
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