tests/hghave: easier way to skip tests

[Adrian Buehlmann]

On 2012-06-09 19:21, Mads Kiilerich wrote:
> Adrian Buehlmann wrote, On 06/09/2012 07:13 PM:
>> On 2012-06-09 17:52, Eduard-Cristian Stefan wrote:
>>> On 2012-06-09 18:28, Mads Kiilerich wrote:
>>>> Possibly. But I'm not sure exactly what it should be used for and how important it is. We shouldn't need these kind of exceptions at all.
>>> It would be an easy way to shorten the feedback loop,
>>> since the test suite takes some time to complete.
>>>
>>> I can live without localizations, svn, git, and P4 tests
>>> most of the time, and some env vars set in MSYS profile
>>> will allow me to stop editing hghave after checkouts.
>> http://selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial-devel/2012-May/040461.html
>>
>> I'm qpushing that patch here before I run the testsuite.
>>
>> It's mostly because I haven't investigated why these tools I have
>> locally installed are causing the testsuite to fail (hangs and crashes).
>>
>> Does it fail on your computer as well? What other tools have you installed?
>>
>> Mads doesn't like to disable those hghave's.
> 
> The easy workaround is to set PATH so these tools isn't found.

That might work. However, on Windows, PATH is often configured by
installing, so users don't usually modify PATH. It's also pretty ugly,
as the respective dialogs on Windows to modify the PATH are pretty
clumsy (although there are programs that help there).

Another problem is, that on Windows there are two PATHs: One is in the
"System variables" and the second one is in the "user variables".
Changing the former requires admin rights. For example I see here, that
I have "C:\Program Files\Perforce" (for p4.exe) in the "System
variables" PATH. I'm pretty sure this was configured like this by the
Perforce installer.

So it's pretty ugly to have to edit the "System variables" PATH each
time I want to run the testsuite. On Windows 7 it's less of a problem
thanks the UAC. But on Windows XP, it's very inconvenient.

> I am sorry to have added a lot of ugly workarounds in the past - I would 
> like to avoid adding more unless there is a good reason that make it a 
> long term "solution".

No problem regarding the workarounds. We surely can improve things now
together. If you wouldn't have brought it that far, also thanks to the
"hackable Mercurial" documentation on the wiki, I wouldn't have taken
another look at trying to get the testsuite running on Windows here.
Things are on a pretty good way now. Congratulations to all who
contributed to this.

My original motivation to hard-disable those hghave's was, that I was
assuming that other people who happen to have those tools installed will
also experience those crashes and hangs I was seeing here. But I admit I
don't know if that's really true. I was fearing that new Windows people
who try the first time to get their feet wet running the testsuite, give
up and don't bother to ask, why it doesn't work "out of the box".

And I have to admit, just disabling those hghave's is certainly papering
over the real problem. So, for me, I can live with my hack patch for now.