Re: make check in contrib

On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 7:18 PM, Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> wrote:
> I noticed again that make check in contrib doesn't work, so here is a
> patch to fix it.  Perhaps someone wants to fill in the Windows support
> for it.  Naturally, this works only for contrib itself, not for external
> packages that use pgxs.
>
> A secondary issue that actually led to this:  I was preparing a Debian
> package for some module^Wextension^W^Hthing that uses pgxs.  The Debian
> packaging tools ("dh", to be exact, for the insiders) have this
> convenience that by default they examine your makefile and execute the
> standard targets, if found, in order.  So it runs make all, make check,
> which then fails because of
>
> check:
>        @echo "'make check' is not supported."
>        @echo "Do 'make install', then 'make installcheck' instead."
>        @exit 1
>
> You can override this, but it still means that everyone who packages an
> extension will have to re-figure this out.
>
> So while this message might be moderately useful (although I'm not sure
> whether it's guaranteed that the suggestion will always work), I'd
> rather get rid of it and not have a check target in the pgxs case.

I think it might be more useful to have a check target that actually
succeeds, even if it does nothing useful. The argument that no check
target at all is more useful than a check target that fails with a
reasonably informative error message seems week to me. It's only
going to be true if - as in the case you mention - external software
is directly inspecting the makefile to figure out what to do. And
that's a pretty weird case to optimize for.

Maybe just change @exit 1 to @exit 0 and call it good?

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
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