[Libreoffice] Brittle unit test dependencies

[Michael Meeks]

Hi Stephan,

On Mon, 2011-12-19 at 14:10 +0100, Stephan Bergmann wrote:
> <http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=9351f4c1d6a3567c3b013894a0cc08471b4b0156> 
> "Tests apparently depend on localedata_en library." is yet another 
> non-obvious dependency the "large" unit tests in sc, sw etc. have on 
> their environment.

	Riight ... nasty. I imagine we're going to need a gb_ComplexText set of
macros to ensure that this stuff can be elegantly shared across the
sc,sw,sd,base bits in future. Cut/paste is truly horrible.

>   I fear that the approach of having such "large" unit 
> tests with fat dependencies, who's dependencies in turn have additional 
> hidden runtime dependencies is not really maintainable.  How should 
> those manually tracked dependencies be kept accurate ?

	Well; hopefully the tinderboxen catch them for us over time - how did
you find this one ?

>  Compare this with the original idea of subsequent tests, making those
> tests depend on a complete installation and running them within the
> environment of that installation.

	My hope of course, is that as we finish gbuild, and move our solver to
look ever more like an install set, it'll get easier and less hacky to
run these unit tests; eg. with your nice 'services' work, we could even
install the .component files into services/ directly into the build tree
it seems to me.

	That doesn't help the dependencies problem - but as long as we're
conservative, and have the big-cut-and-paste-list-of-common-deps
centralised, I hope we'll not have too much maintenance trouble here (?)

	Thoughts ?

		Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks at suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot