Re: [Kissme-general] Re: Should I or not submit changes?

[Mark Wielaard <mark at klomp dot org>]

Hi,

On Wed, 2002-07-17 at 02:47, Stephen Crawley wrote:
> However ... I've looked at Alex's scripts, and concluded that it would be
> better to use the 'mauve-kissme' key file that Mark Wielaard emailed last
> week, especially if we can put that file into CVS.  

We should probably look at the choose script and Alex his scripts and
try to get the best of both worlds.

I think the main problem of Mauve is that the documentation is a bit out
of date and that there are no clear instructions on how to add new
keys/tags for test. There should also be a simple template/example file
that people can use when adding new tests. Some of the tests are really
a bit ugly and don't show the best possible way to use the framework.

> The problem is that if you run Mauve tests the way that the Mauve README
> file says you should, the key file has to live in the Mauve directory.
> This is real nuisance.  [I can arrange that the Kissme make rules for
> running the Mauve tests copy the key file to the place where Mauve 
> expects it to be ... but that's a HACK.]

Such a hack is also used in the libgcj testsuite.

> Here are some other beefs that I have with Mauve:

Thanks for the list. If nobody else does it I will try to work on these
items.

>   *  Mauve's "make clean" doesn't delete the .class files.
>
>   *  Someone has checked some files generated by autoconf, etcetera
>      (configure and Makefile IIRC).   These contain dependencies on
>      the version of autoconf, etcetera used on said person's machine
>      and break on my machine.  These generated files need to be 
>      removed from CVS.

Yes, having autogenerated files in CVS annoys me greatly. I am in favor
of just removing the Makefile.in, aclocal.m4 and configure files from
CVS and adding instructions on how to create them yourself. If nobody
objects I will do that soon.


>   *  Mauve needs a global cvsignore file to ignore *.class files and
>      a .cvsignore file on the top directory to ignore the files created
>      by autoconf and configure.

That would be nice. I don't know if I can update the CVSROOT/cvsignore
file for mauve though.

>   *  The Mauve configure.ac metascript should have a --with option for
>      specifying a directory or search path for finding key files.  

--with-keys-dir? Would be nice if that was also used to get the
appropriate xfails file. libgcj has some extra support for xfails that
we might be able to import into Mauve proper (although I think it
depends on dejagnu).

>   *  The Mauve makefile should notice when I have edited the current
>      key file, and rebuild the class list file.
> 
>      At the moment, I think that the class list only gets rebuilt 
>      if you change the value of the KEYS environment variable.

I always do a rm -f .save-keys choices before typing make.
Something clearly wants to do some optimization of what should/shouldn't
be recompiled/scanned, but I don't know what the intention was of the
mechanism.

Cheers,

Mark