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

[Thomas Jost]

On Wed, 20 Jul 2011 10:28:38 -0700, Jameson Graef Rollins <jrollins at finestructure.net> wrote:
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> 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.

You're right, just depending on screen would be enough (the package is
just 864 kB on Arch Linux...), and supporting alternative tools
would make the test suite more complicated and less robust. But the
dependency on screen should be more *explicit*: if it's not available,
the test suite should skip all the emacs tests and display a message
about screen.

Apparently test-lib.sh includes some things about prerequisites. I'll
try to use these to implement the explicit dependency on screen.

Regards,

-- 
Thomas/Schnouki
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