Bruno Haible <br...@clisp.org> writes: > These tests are not pointless. They serve 3 purposes:
Thanks Bruno, those are all good points. > 1) They are integration tests. They test the internationalization > from the beginning (a source file with marked strings) to the > end (the receipt of a localized message at runtime). > In many of the languages / language runtime systems such tests > with gettext are not part of the language package. Therefore they > have to be here. > > 2) They serve as a test for the documentation. If a test fails on > some platform, with some version of PHP, Vala, or whatever, then > - even if it's not the fault of the xgettext and msgfmt tools - > you know that you have to update the documentation section of > the gettext manual about the particular language. > > 3) They serve as a reference: what options need to be passed to > xgettext and msgfmt in order to make these tools useful for > the particular language. This info ought to be contained in > the documentation, but sometimes the documentation is too > terse or may be misnuderstood. Considering those and the fact that they could fail independently with gettext, doesn't it make more sense to actually install them? https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/GnomeGoals/InstalledTests > Yes, the lang-* tests are portability hassles. Yes, when they fail, > most of the time the cause is not inside the gettext package. So, I was wondering if a failure of the lang-* tests should be considered as a failure of the standard package building procedure (i.e., make && make check). We could provide a way to skip them, in a similar way that coreutils skips expensive tests by default: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/tree/init.cfg#n362 Regards, -- Daiki Ueno
