Re: test-getaddrinfo

[Simon Josefsson]

Bruno Haible <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi Simon,
>
> "make check" with the getaddrinfo-tests module yields a lot of output:
...
> Can you make this test silent when it succeeds? For example, write the
> output into a temporary file, and print the contents of that file or not,
> depending whether the test program exited with a failure code or successfully?

Hi!  I think there are two independent problems here:

1) The self-test requires network connectivity.

2) The self-test is noisy.

For now, I think we can ignore 1), but it might make sense to consider
a non-networked self test in the future.

For the second, I kind of prefer having self-tests be noisy, even when
they succeed.  Having that output present in build logs etc can help
understand a platform or code better.  For example, if we'd ever see
an IP address which is byte-swapped compared to the one that is
correct, we can guess that it is an endian problem.  However, making
the self-test check the return IP address for a well-known address
seems like a bad idea -- IP addresses change over time.  This is just
an example of problems with hiding the output can cause.  I'm moving
from silent self tests in most of my projects to noisy self tests, and
I suspect I had other reasons for doing so too.

But I don't feel strongly about this.  To help me understand better,
why do you consider noisy self tests a problem?

/Simon