Re: test-update-copyright requires perl

[Jim Meyering]

Eric Blake wrote:
> According to Jim Meyering on 8/15/2009 9:50 AM:
>>> I'm not sure why some invocations work and others fail, but the point is
>>> that update-copyright doesn't work as-is on cygwin 1.5; and it also has
>>> the annoying failure path of either renaming or worse deleting the
>>> original file.  So I'm not sure how best to add skip logic to
>>> test-update-copyright to avoid spurious test failures.
>>
>> Well, with that, adjusting the test script
>> to detect and skip should be trivial.
>
> Thanks - that was enough to get going.  Here's what I'm pushing (I don't
> think you'll mind being listed in the ChangeLog).
>
>> However, eventually, (for improved portability) I want to convert
>> update-copyright itself not to use that mechanism.  I.e., to have the
>> usual #!/usr/bin/perl first line, without any options.  That's also in
>> line with the goal of adding --help and --version options.
>
> Yes, it would be good to clean up the #! line.  But we still have to
> remember that #!/usr/bin/perl is not required to exist on end user's
> machines.  Coreutils even goes so far as to dynamically use $(PERL) during
> the testsuite (check.mk's shell_or_perl_ function), exploiting the checks
> for perl done during configure.  But while packages like coreutils or
> autoconf that already require perl during configure can get away with
> that, I don't think it is worth bloating configure to add $(PERL) checking
> to simpler packages like m4 that have no other perl dependency.

Agreed.

> Subject: [PATCH] test-update-copyright: skip if perl is insufficient
>
> * tests/test-update-copyright.sh: Failure to run maintainer tool
> should not cause testsuite failure on cygwin 1.5.

Thanks for handling that,
and for cleaning up the temporaries when skipping.
With your added trap, at least the final

rm $TMP*

has been rendered redundant.
Though technically, I suspect all of them may be removed, now.