Re: [PATCH 1/2] tests: test_md5 prints md5sum only

[Ruediger Meier <sweet_f_a@gmx.de>]

On Wednesday 06 April 2016, Ruediger Meier wrote:
> On Wednesday 06 April 2016, Isaac Dunham wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 06, 2016 at 01:33:58PM +0100, Ruediger Meier wrote:
> > > On Wednesday 06 April 2016, Karel Zak wrote:
> > > > On Wed, Apr 06, 2016 at 12:30:17PM +0200, Ruediger Meier wrote:
> > > > > We want to to use it for other tests without depending on
> > > > > gnu md5sum and without cut or awk.
> > > >
> > > > It does not seem like anything critical, both patches applied
> > > > to the next branch (will be in v2.29). Thanks.
> > >
> > > That's ok. These patches do not fix any existing problem yet.
> > > They are just one minor step to remove coreutils dependency from
> > > out tests. We would still need to fix usage of readlink, seq and
> > > truncate.
> >
> > Is this for the sake of something where you cannot expect *any*
> > coreutils-equivalent to be installed?
> > If you can't expect that, can you expect the build scripts to work?
>
> Yes, autoconf/automake/libtool generate highly portable shell
> scripts. For example the configure script even checks whether there
> is a thread-safe "mkdir -p" available or what kind of sed is
> installed.
>
> The only problems are usually caused by hand-written scripts like
> shell snippets in Makefile.am or our test scripts ;)
>
> Our tests depend on GNU extensions for md5sum, readlink, seq,
> truncate, find,  xargs, tar, sed and the shell has to be bash. That's
> all not critical but at least nice to be fixed if it doesn't make our
> scripts too ugly.
>
> > I ask because md5sum, seq, and readlink are included in every set
> > of base utilities I'm aware of, including coreutils, busybox,
> > toybox, and even sbase (the 'suckless' base utilities).
> > That said, seq and md5sum are only specified in the LSB, and
> > readlink isn't even there.
>
> md5sum is special. It's not Posix and not available or completely
> different on non-Linux systems.

Just to clarify. I wouldn't have done this patch like this for other 
projects but here in util-linux we have our own (portable) test_md5 
already since 2008. So why not using it to avoid one more GNUism!

> About seq, readlink and truncate: our test-suite is using
> non-portable GNU extenstions. I guess it would not run with busybox.
> You can similate that even with coreutils:
>
> $ POSIXLY_CORRECT=1 make check
>
> I you feel boring you may try to fix some of the mentioned GNUisms ;)
>
> cu,
> Rudi
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