Re: [PATCH] t/meson.build: fix up tests for 'seen' branch

[Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>]

On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at 05:00:44PM +0100, Ramsay Jones wrote:

Thanks, I'll pick these up.

> Hmm, this is going to be a PITA as far as maintenance is concerned! :(
> If I am reading it correctly, the cmake solution uses file globbing
> to get the list of test files to run - could meson do the same?

In theory we can, yes. But there's a big problem with it, both in Meson
and in CMake: the instructions to deduce source files only get executed
at configure time. Consequently, when new files get added, the build
instructions do not get updated accordingly and are thus broken. So
CMake does get around this, but not in a way that is feasible for use as
our main build system, and the same would be true for Meson.

For our integration-style tests I'd be okay with not listing the files
individually, such that we instead use e.g. prove(1) to run all tests
via a single test target. It would be a regression in functionality as
we now cannot easily run e.g. "meson test t0000*", but at least we would
not have to maintain the list of test scripts anymore.

But for our source files I don't really see an alternative to listing
them out explicitly. You don't want things like git-rebase(1) or
git-bisect(1) to be broken just because one of the commits happens to
add or remove a file. And this is true for whichever build system we
want to adopt as additional official buildsystem, whether that is CMake
or Meson.

I guess we have less churn here anyway, and we would notice breakage
more readily because things would stop compiling. So this is likely less
of a problem compared to our tests.

Patrick