'make release_tests' doesn't work in R13-B01

[Elliot Murphy]

Hi!

Running the release_tests: target in the Makefile doesn't work, at least
not in R13-B01. It seems that the root of the problems is that the
various tests/ subdirectories are not included in the source tarball,
although the test_server is. For example the makefile tries to cd into
lib/asn1/tests, and that directory doesn't exist.

Why do I care? I'm working on the Erlang packages for Ubuntu (and this
is probably relevant for Debian too). We're including CouchDB by default
in the next release of Ubuntu, and so this means that Erlang is getting
a lot more attention than it has before since it's going on the CD and
in the default Ubuntu desktop installation. The Ubuntu security team has
asked that the test suite be enabled as part of the Erlang package build
process, so that we can have a higher degree of confidence that applying
a bugfix has not broken anything - it's a standard thing that we do in
Ubuntu for all sorts of important foundational packages like languages,
databases, etc.

Is it deliberate that the tests are not included in the source tarball?
Is that something that could be changed?

We're about to start delivering Erlang to many many millions of Ubuntu
desktops in the next few weeks, and I would really really like to be
able to run 'make release_tests' anytime we need to apply a critical
patch or something when processing a security update sometime in the
next 18 months that we will be supporting the packages we have shipped
with Ubuntu 9.10.

Thanks for making Erlang(yay erlang rocks!) and for your consideration.
-- 
Elliot Murphy | https://launchpad.net/~statik/

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