Unable to make dist after recent changes

[Geert Janssens]

On donderdag 1 december 2011, John Ralls wrote:
> On Nov 30, 2011, at 5:05 PM, John Ralls wrote:
> > On Nov 30, 2011, at 8:44 AM, Derek Atkins wrote:
> >> John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> writes:
> >>> I've just committed the requisite fixes, and distcheck now works on my
> >>> Mac. But there's an older problem that causes make check to fail on
> >>> Debian Squeeze and Fedora 12 if Gnucash hasn't been installed. Since
> >>> distcheck does exactly that, it fails too. I'm bisecting to try and
> >>> figure out what is the quick fix (after banging on it for three days
> >>> *didn't* solve the problem).
> >>> 
> >>> The actual problem is the way we retrieve some modules, using
> >>> gnc_path_get_stdreportdir() (for standard reports) and
> >>> gnc_path_get_pkglibdir() (for the engine backends). Neither of those
> >>> as written will work with uninstalled libraries, so the tests
> >>> fail. But that change went in early last year, and the tests didn't
> >>> start failing until a changeset from some time this spring.
> >> 
> >> Perhaps the TEST_ENVIRONMENT is not set correctly to point to the
> >> correct build directories?
> > 
> > No, the path utilities don't pay any attention to the environment. I'm
> > working on changing that.
> 
> In fact, it looks like the report tests broke when Geert *fixed* the test
> environments, because it wasn't actually trying to run the tests, just
> giving up and passing because it couldn't find the modules. Geert didn't
> see the error, of course, because he had run "make install" at some point,
> so the test was able to find the reports and the backends.
> 
Interesting, so my fixes actually revealed a bug in the module testing code.

If I find some time, I will run this experiment on Fedora 15 as well and see 
what happens.

There was a part in the test Makefiles I wasn't sure about that may be 
related: the GNC_TEST_DEPS contains a number --library-dir lines. Should these 
point to all build directories with required modules ? I thought this was 
superfluous because the module loading code adds all gnc-module-dir paths to 
LD_LIBRARY_PATH already. But I haven't looked into this in much detail.

Geert