[Pkg-electronics-devel] Bug#561906: Bug#561906: FTBFS: make[5]: *** [tests] Error 1

[Peter Clifton]

On Tue, 2009-12-22 at 08:14 +1100, Hamish Moffatt wrote:

> Thanks! I see now that it's trying to write logs into ~/.gEDA which won't 
> work with an unwritable/non-existent $HOME.

Perhaps we will be able to fix this upstream (for 1.6.1?).

Hamish.. is there any way we can work around the issue for the 1.6.0
build? Can we export a temporary $HOME somewhere in the build tree
whilst the tests are run?


In the long term, we should make gEDA apps fail more gracefully if they
can't open a log file. Dumping output to stderr "might" work.. although
it would change what is output in the case of $HOME being unwriteable -
which could in its-self break a more rigorous test-suite that checked
expected stderr output.

Fortunately for gsymcheck, the output we are testing against is stdout,
so that should be ok. I can't think of any tests which rely on known
stderr output, so perhaps we are OK here (for now).

Personally, I see this as one more argument in favour of logging in
$PWD, like we used to. (or was it $(dirname $schematic)... I can't
recall). It would still be nice if that worked on a read-only dir.

Of course.. there is other stuff gEDA looks to write / read on ~/.gEDA,
so we'll have to test those cases as well.


Best wishes,

Peter C.