Re: Tests, Emacs-25 and Conditional Features

[Phillip Lord]

Michael Albinus <address@hidden> writes:

> address@hidden (Phillip Lord) writes:
>
> Hi Philip,
>
>> Something like
>>
>> (skip-unless (or (gnutls-available-p) conditional-feature-force))
>>
>> So, we pick have a standard test selector which means "all the
>> conditional features should be expected to be on". Probably, you would
>> want "all the conditional features that are supposed to be on by
>> default, should be expected to be on"
>
> That does not exist for everything. For example, in the file
> notification case there are 5 different possible "conditional features",
> all of them valid:
>
> - inotify enabled
> - kqueue enabled
> - gfilenotify enabled
> - w32notify enable
> - file notification disabled.
>
> How does a test library shall know what is intended by the user?

Good point, although, if I understand the notification correctly, you
have an abstraction layer over these?

>>
>> It would be nice if there were a standard way of detecting this. As
>> Michael's example shows, we have a gnutls-available-p function which
>> is defined if gnutls is not available, but for libxml, we check for
>> non-definition of functions.
>
> This would require for all optional packages to provide such a
> standardized form. We don't have it.
>
> One way would be to test (skip-unless (featurep 'package)). But even
> this is not possible in general, packages like xml.c miss
>
>   Fprovide (intern_c_string ("libxml"), Qnil);
>
> Maybe this is an error in xml.c, which should be fixed?


Having a standard list of compile conditional features would be nice.

Phil