[PATCH] test: run emacs inside tmux if screen is not available

[Jameson Graef Rollins]

On Wed, 20 Jul 2011 17:37:35 +0400, Dmitry Kurochkin <dmitry.kurochkin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 20 Jul 2011 14:36:36 +0200, Thomas Jost <schnouki at schnouki.net> wrote:
> > Before this change, the test suite reported many failed tests on machines where
> > screen is not installed (which is the case of many *BSD systems). This patch
> > makes the test suite try to use tmux, another terminal multiplexer, if screen is
> > not available.
> 
> This is a nice improvement.  But I think we should make it even better :)
> There are more terminal emulators besides screen and tmux (dtach comes
> to mind).  We need a more general mechanism for trying them.  There
> should be a list of commands for running terminal emulators in the order
> of preference (I think that is dtach, tmux, screen), and we should try
> each one in a loop (this would also avoid repeating the long emacs
> command).

Hi, guys.  I suppose you can go down this route if you want, but I worry
that it just adds a lot of extra code to the test suite that will
ultimately make it less robust.  What's wrong with just depending on
screen for the tests?  I'm sure screen is available on every operating
system that we currently support.

It makes me wary that we would be starting a precedent for making a
bunch of conditionals for all of the possible alternative tools we use
in the test suite.  Maybe that's an overblown concern, though.

jamie.
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