Re: syslogd: Adjust to readutmp changes in Gnulib.

[Bruno Haible]

Simon Josefsson wrote:
> In my experience, adding gnulib self-tests to projects lead to a
> maintainance cost to debug gnulib self-tests failures, which are rarely
> of importance to the core project.

It depends on the project.

For some projects, the gnulib self-tests are useful for quickly dispatching
responsibility to gnulib. For example, in coreutils, if some 'mkfifo' test
fails on some platform, the first thing a maintainer will look at is whether
the gnulib tests of the 'mkfifo' and 'mknod' modules fail as well. If yes,
he can quickly delegate to gnulib. Similarly, in GNU libunistring on macOS,
if I see not only the GNU libunistring tests fail but also the gnulib
tests regarding iconv(), I know that the macOS iconv() is broken and that
I need to start adding workarounds in gnulib.

In a project that uses only more-or-less "conventional" gnulib modules,
on the other hand, the gnulib self-tests probably don't help.

> Btw, if enable it would be nice to add a simple instruction to the
> README saying how to run 'make check' with gnulib self-tests disabled.
> Is there any agreed on practice to achieve that?

Not that I know of. The only common practice that I know of, so far, is
to put the gnulib-tests directory last in the SUBDIRS variable, so that
gnulib-tests failures don't mask failures of the package's core tests.

Bruno