Re: make check fails due to missing test directory

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hello, Paul

On Fri, May 03, 2019 at 15:01:58 -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 5/3/19 12:13 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > You need to download the test suite.  It is not part of the release
> > tarball.  You can find it in the Emacs development repository.

> Sure, but as his email suggests, it's better for 'make check' to succeed
> when the set of tests is empty. That way, standardized build procedures
> (like his) are more likely to do the right thing. I installed the patch
> 0001 (attached) into the master branch to do that.

> We've talked before about distributing tests in the Emacs tarball -
> which is what the GNU Codings Standards recommend and what pretty much
> every other GNU package does - and this email suggests that now's a good
> time to do that. Distributing tests adds about 2.5% to the size of the
> compressed tarball, and nowadays that is a small price to pay for making
> tests available to people building from a release tarball rather than a
> Git clone. Proposed patch attached as patch 0002, and comments welcome.

The tests in make check are development tests.  They're not build tests.
In fact, they're fairly useless for anybody who isn't developing Emacs.
Somebody who is developing Emacs will have the git repository.

Therefore, we shouldn't be encouraging users to run these tests, just as
we don't encourage users to byte compile the .el files.  Both these
things have been done as part of the release process, and both are
wastes of time for users.  I, personally, would certainly not run these
tests after downloading an Emacs release.

So I think, if we're going to include these tests in releases, there
should be a strong recommendation in the docs NOT to run them, that
they're only there for people with special needs.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).