Re: how to handle missing "prove"

Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> writes:
> Here is a patch to use "missing" to handle the case when "prove" is not
> present.

Wouldn't it be easier to do what we do for Perl, viz in Makefile.global.in

ifneq (@PERL@,)
# quoted to protect pathname with spaces
PERL = '@PERL@'
else
PERL = $(missing) perl
endif

However, with either of these approaches, "make check-world" gets a hard
failure if you lack "prove". Is that what we want? It's certainly not
very consistent with what you've been doing to make the tests just slide
by (rather than fail on) missing/too old Perl modules.

ISTM that the project policy for external components like this has been
"don't rely on them unless user says to use them, in which case fail if
they aren't present". So perhaps what we ought to have is a configure
switch along the lines of "--enable-tap-tests". If you don't specify it,
prove_check expands to nothing. If you do specify it, we fail if we
lack any of the expected support, both "prove" and whatever the agreed-on
set of Perl modules is.

regards, tom lane