On Sunday, June 1, 2003, at 08:43 am, Andrew Savige wrote:
Merlyn's use perl journal of April 29, 2003: http://use.perl.org/~merlyn/journal/ suggests using environment variables to spare the installer of CPAN modules a long wait while running 'make test'. One reply noted that DBD, HTML::Mason and other modules already do this.
Actually DBD & HTML::Mason don't do what Merlyn is asking for. They use environment variables to skip tests when the necessary features are not available (no database, no mod_perl, etc.)
Merlyn is talkin about skipping tests because they take too long ("more than a minute or two").
Is there a standard name/s for such environment variables? If not, is it desirable to standardise on at least one environment variable name to control whether long tests are run? Is anyone using alternative mechanisms to solve this problem?
I don't see it as a real problem. If I've written a test I want it run. Otherwise I wouldn't have written it. Not running tests is pretty much the ultimate sin as far as I am concerned - but I'm odd that way :-)
There's some related discussion on <http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=254011> that you might find of interest.
Cheers,
Adrian
