Re: [PATCH] {maint} Improve, extend and tweak tests on Texinfo support.

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Stefano Lattarini wrote on Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 02:14:26AM CET:
> On Monday 10 January 2011, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > 
> > The longer the names, and the more the tests, the earlier we will exceed
> > the command line length limit in our 'check' rules (important to fix on
> > all systems it happens) and our 'distdir' rule (important at least for
> > the maintainer's machine).
> >
> Ouch, I never tought about these issues :-(
> 
> > So, support for more than one parallel-tests testsuite per Makefile.am
> > is needed soonish.
> >
> Or better (if possible) finding out a way to transparently avoid
> commandline-lenght issues when calling $(MAKE) recursively.  There
> was a previous attempt of yours at this IIRC, but it didn't work
> out.  Maybe it's time to give it a second shot?

I don't think there is any way to avoid the limit with portable make
alone.  When gnu-make infrastructure is in place, we can think about
a replacement rule for that, but we should provide multiple test suites
anyway, that's also nice for subsetting in general.

> > Besides, while I agree
> > that the 8+3 names are often lacking descriptiveness, I also don't like
> > typing too much.
> >
> But how often do you type the name of the testcases after all? (I mean,
> without the help of tab completion of course ;-).

Oh, this is obviously not a big deal, but I actually try NetBSD csh
sometimes which doesn't seem to provide it; this is mostly to ensure
that the $SHELL setting from the environment doesn't leak into our
code.

> > For example, I'm not sure why we named the 'posixsubst*.test' files
> > that way; there is little specifically posixy about these substitution
> > rules.
> >
> Well, they are the only POSIX-mandated textual substitutions for make
> macros, so I thought the test names were appropriated -- or am I missing
> something?

What's wrong with s/^posix// though?  Lots of other things are
Posix-mandated too, but we don't make a big deal out of that either?

Cheers,
Ralf