In 2.0.51_pre9 the new feature src_test(), a possibility to test the compiled binaries has been added to portage, Gentoo’s install scripts. This was a nice enhancement but nevertheless, most of the developers seems to ignore it. It is not the most important thing, so sometimes it makes sense to prevent the ebuild from executing «make test» and to do an «src_test() { true }» instead of executing the test but in common cases it is sensible to do it that way. But if you’d took care, you had mentioned, that «maketest» is in there since May 2003, which is quite a long time to take a look at it.
Using it or not using it is not the most important thing. More important is if a developer takes care on it. Our BreakMyGentoo-policy is clear: disable it if it prevents a package from being successfully built and is not a serious bug or enable it if is building. This rule is ok as it is not an important bug. But e.g. most of the GNOME-herd in Gentoo ignores this completely. They don’t care if it is important, if is should be disabled, if it is unimportant or whatever. They just ignore complaints about that feature. This is annoying because you’re unable to built a complete Gentoo-system with maketest in your feautures-list, because GNOME will surely hang off. So I want to appeal to the Gentoo developers and – of course – to the maintainer of the specific software: please take case on «make test», provide such a make-target if it’s reasonable and test if it is working before you release a new version of your software. Don’t provide an interactive test, don’t try to access to the X-server during the test, don’t try to write or read from files outside the destdir, don’t do something else annoying.
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