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Re: Makepkgs fallout

To: Ken McDonell <kenj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Makepkgs fallout
From: Nathan Scott <nathans@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2012 01:09:46 -0500 (EST)
Cc: pcp@xxxxxxxxxxx
In-reply-to: <1354064294.28451.16.camel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-to: Nathan Scott <nathans@xxxxxxxxxx>
Hi Ken,

----- Original Message -----
> On Mon, 2012-11-26 at 18:33 -0500, Nathan Scott wrote:
> > BTW, I've reverted this change for now - we think it may be the
> > cause of some confusing test results here.  There's also some
> > evidence that running tests from in a workarea (ie below qa/)
> > is using pcp.conf from the build rather than the root.  Which
> > seems odd & unexpected to me, but I havent found the source of
> > that yet.
> 
> I don't see how the Makepkgs change can be breaking things for QA.
> 

"confusing test results" != "breaking QA".  I don't really fully
understand what happened (didn't happen to me & it was difficult
to debug remotely).

> I do think we have a big problem associated with moving QA into the
> PCP
> tree, namely that we descend into qa and qa/src _both_ in the build
> and
> when running QA from a workarea (the latter being a non-negotiable
> requirement IMHO for on-going QA maintenance and development).

*nod* to the last bit, unconvinced there's a big problem related to
QA-in-tree though.  Also overlooks the good aspects of keeping fixes
with their associated QA test updates, and the way that all builds
now must have a successful QA build too.

Let me distract you ;) by saying there is more of a problem around
not needing any mechanism for conditional code building in qa/src/.
e.g. qa/src/unpack.c uses pmEventRecord, which is post-3.5.0 only.
This should be a problem no matter where qa lives - yet noone reports
it, making me wonder just how important all the back-compat goop we
keep in the QA tests really is?  Once there, that goop has a non-zero
maintenance cost, yet after a relatively short time, it seems to be
unnecessary baggage.

A possible approach would be to invent a mechanism for using PCP_VER
in the source makefile too (?) and having a policy of culling compat
macros after N new releases have been made.

> In one case (the build) you _want_ to use include files and pcp.conf
> from ../src/include ... in the other case (running QA) you _want_ to
> use
> the installed versions of the include files and pcp.conf (from a
> packages build).

This is the same issue that several PMDAs have (with the GNUmakefile
and GNUmakefile.install split) ...

> Seems like we need to back QA out the PCP tree _or_ find some clever
> way of making the makefiles schizophrenic.

That is how the QA source makefiles operate (schizo - using the usual
split between GNUmakefile and GNUmakefile.install that we do elsewhere
and a GNUlocaldefs for all the common/shared make goop).

cheers.

ps: lets also not forget there was a problem that the change I had to
backout was fixing ... not clear to me what that was, still, esp how
it related to the deb packaging that already had the configure flag.

--
Nathan

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