I just noticed a problem. update-copyright is a perl script only intended for maintainer use, which is fine, since only maintainers are required to have perl installed (after all, we already know that maintainers have perl by virtue of the fact that they are running autoconf). But, as explicitly permitted by the GNU standards, end users need not have good enough perl. In other words, blindly including test-update-copyright as part of 'make check' in any package that bootstrapped via 'gnulib-tool --with-tests' can lead to spurious failures for some end users because the test is assuming more than the end user is required to have.
One option is to just relax test-update-copyright.sh to gracefully skip the test if perl is not found or can't successfully perform copyright updates. Another option is to figure out a way to make gnulib tool distinguish between tests of end-user code (most tests) vs. tests of maintainer-only tools (test- update-copyright, test-vc-list-files, ...) and set things up so that maintainer tool tests are only run by 'make distcheck' rather than 'make check'. Actually, even 'make distcheck' might be wrong, since that is supposed to work without autotools; and 'make maintainer-check' as part of maint.mk may be a better place. Any other ideas, or an approach for a patch along any of these lines? For the record, I discovered this because 'perl -ei' fails on cygwin 1.5 [but works in cygwin 1.7] because of older cygwin's inability to delete in-use files: --- - 2009-08-14 14:25:35.060804000 -0600 +++ update-copyright.test-ex-stderr 2009-08-14 14:25:35.013932200 -0600 @@ -1,2 +1,7 @@ -update-copyright.test-ex.4: warning: FSF copyright statement not found -update-copyright.test-ex.5: warning: FSF copyright statement not found +Can't do inplace edit on update-copyright.test-ex.1: Permission denied. +Can't do inplace edit on update-copyright.test-ex.2: Permission denied. +Can't do inplace edit on update-copyright.test-ex.3: Permission denied. +Can't do inplace edit on update-copyright.test-ex.4: Permission denied. +Can't do inplace edit on update-copyright.test-ex.5: Permission denied. +Can't do inplace edit on update-copyright.test-ex.6: Permission denied. +Can't do inplace edit on update-copyright.test-ex.7: Permission denied. FAIL: test-update-copyright.sh -- Eric Blake
