Re: [PATCH 2/2] gnu: Add emacs-org-trello.

[Roel Janssen <roel@gnu.org>]

Alex Kost writes:

> Ricardo Wurmus (2016-10-27 20:48 +0200) wrote:
>
>> Alex Kost <alezost@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>>> @Alex: could you please confirm this?  Should these inputs be mentioned
>>>> at all?  If so, is it sufficient to add them to native-inputs?
>>>
>>> As for me, I don't see a reason to add these additional inputs,
>>> emacs-build-system will not run tests anyway.
>>
>> Thank you for clarifying.
>>
>> Is there a reason why we don’t run the tests?  We do this by default for
>> all other packages.
>
> How can it be done?  There is no common way for emacs packages to
> perform tests: only some packages have Makefile (with "check" phase),
> and it would be a really good luck if "make check" as is succeeded for
> them.  Usually such projects use Cask to run tests or even some custom
> scripts.  They may use just "ert" or "ert-running" package (or maybe
> something else).
>
> After all, I think that adding a 'check' phase to emacs-build-system is
> not worth an effort: there would be too much manual interventions in
> package recipes to make tests work for different emacs packages.
>
> But I better let Federico speak about «why we don’t run the tests» as he
> wrote emacs-build-system :-)

So, the only proper way to do it, is to manually add a test phase in
each package definition.  But then we still have to add a lot of
dependencies that are only needed to run the tests, and even then the
tests don't say much..  In the case of this package, the test functions
can't run because they use functions that aren't loaded yet, which
results in failures of the tests (while the package works just fine).

Could I therefore, please, go ahead and push the patch without the
additional inputs for running tests?

Kind regards,
Roel Janssen