The new testsuite -- thoughts

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Our new testsuite in HEAD has advantages

- less time spent in bootstrap
- nice framework

and disadvantages

- running some tests takes more time
- for some tests the client must have Autoconf and Automake,
  thus also GNU m4, Perl, gettext plus whatever Perl needs.

This is by far too much I am willing to do for testing on a new system.
I am not willing to tell a bug reporter even that he has to install more
than just Autoconf and Automake.  On some systems you have strict quotas
and limited time (and yes, most have perl, bug many do not have the
other autotools).  Bug reporters generally just use a libtoolized
package, and getting them to even install the Libtool package at all can
be hard.

On the other hand, I know testing with the client aclocal/autom4te and
such is very useful and thus necessary to some extent.

Is it possible to get the new testsuite to work without the other tools
(maybe with limited number of tests)?  Can we then adopt the habit of
not using the other autotools in tests that do not specifically test
using them?

Peter's last patch seems to be a good example of this.

Comments appreciated,
Ralf