Re: Test failures associated with license.m

[Daniel J Sebald]

On 10/04/2014 03:00 PM, Carnë Draug wrote:
> On 4 October 2014 19:41, Daniel J Sebald<address@hidden>  wrote:
> > I'm seeing some test failures.  One with polygcd, which I think is a known
> > random occurrence failure.  (Should we change it to "known failure"?)  Then
> > there are five failures for the output of the license command:
> >
> > > > > > > processing
> > > > > > > /usr/local/src/octave/octave-complex_operators/octave/scripts/miscellaneous/license.m
> >
> > ***** assert ((license ("inuse", "octave")).feature, "octave")
> > !!!!! test failed
> > cellfun: C must be a cell array
> >
> > etc.
>
> At first I couldn't replicate this. The problem is that you don't have
> any package installed and 'pkg ("describe", "all")' is returning nothing
> instead of an empty cell array. I guess this should be fixed in pkg instead.
>
> Actually, I'd arguee that it should be fixed so that it returns a
> struct array, rather than a cell array of scalar structs but I'm
> afraid that may break old code.

This one confounded me, so now I know what is happening.  I'm getting

octave:63> [out1 out2] = pkg ("describe", "all")
warning: describe: some elements in list of return values are undefined
warning: called from
    describe at line 86 column 1
    pkg at line 537 column 31
out1 = [](0x0)
out2 = {}(0x0)
octave:64> class(out1)
ans = double
octave:65> class(out2)
ans = cell

With or without the fix, if the user has no packages installed then 
there isn't much of a test.  No real problem, as I'm sure there are so 
many already with installed packages that it would be caught quick. 
However, is there is an easy way to create a bogus or empty package from 
a script in some temporary file to install before running the test?

Dan