Re: Autotest test suite size

[Mark D. Baushke]

<#secure method=pgp mode=sign address@hidden> 

I have not looked much at the autconf mailing list's previous
threads on the topic of shell functions, so please excuse if
this question has already been covered previously...

Has anyone given any thought to the idea that a portable 'shell
function' approach could also be accomplished using external shell
scripts and the addition of the directory containing those scripts into
the PATH for the test?

While I would prefer that these entities be "shell functions" for
performance reasons, I would not have a strong objection to them being
external scripts as long as the autotest macros took care of generating
them for me and let me reference the tests so generated via another
macro invocation.

For some test harness frameworks (such as cvs) there are some operations
that are done many times, replicating this code for each test in the
script will just generate thousands of duplicate lines in the test suite
script to no good purpose and this unnecessary bloat is not desirable.

        Thanks,
        -- Mark