[systemd-devel] [PATCH v4] Skip tests that depend on /etc/machine-id if it is not present

[Ramkumar Ramachandra]

Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
> I started munging your patch to apply it, but on second thought it is
> totally the wrong direction to take. The purpose of tests is to check
> if systemd will function after installation. And as mentioned
> elsewhere in the thread, journald will break badly, and thus systemd
> will not function as expected. So it is much better to have the tests
> fail as they do now, then to paper over a missing file. So I think that
> the patch should
> (a) skip _some_ of the tests to reduce noise,
> (b) fail at least one test to tell the user that /etc/machine-id is missing.

Hm, you have a point.  On Debian, "/etc/machine-id" is created when
the systemd package is installed -- I'm not sure if it's in the source
code or if it's a custom Debian patch.  Either way, there should be
one test checking the pre-existence of files (like /etc/mtab), to
assert whether the OS is systemd-ready -- and this test should fail.

> I would be nice to
> (c) using automake skip (below) to do that,

This is a hack.  Ideally, I'd like real testsuite (not a bunch of
asserts thrown around randomly) with a way to execute tests based on
pre-requisites, like the one in git.git.  I'll try to write one for
systemd in the evening, and see how that goes.

Ram