[Quilt-dev] diffstat and test suite

[Jean Delvare]

Hi all,

There is now one test file in the quilt test suite which requires
diffstat (dir-a-b.test). It causes "make check" to freeze when quilt
has been configured --without-diffstat. The reason is that we create a
diffstat wrapper (compat/diffstat) in this case. The wrapper is
supposed to call the real diffstat, and that would "work" (i.e. fail
cleanly) when the wrapper is installed. However it does NOT work when
the wrapper is still in compat, and compat is in the PATH (which is the
case when running the test suite): the wrapper will call itself in
loops forever.

This raises two questions:
1* Why do we create a diffstat wrapper when --without-diffstat has been
passed to configure (or configure simply failed to find diffstat)? I
don't see the point. I would understand a wrapper saying "Sorry,
diffstat isn't installed" as we have for sendmail, but a wrapper
calling a binary we know isn't available, I don't get it.

2* Do we really want to use a quilt command which requires diffstat in
the test suite? It is an optional component, and I believe everyone
should be able to run the test suite. If we really want to test
diffstat, I think we should do so in a separate test file, and only run
it if diffstat was found.

Thanks,
-- 
Jean Delvare