[Bioperl-l] Installing all modules required for testing

[Chris Fields]

On Jul 5, 2007, at 9:22 AM, Nathan S. Haigh wrote:

> Sendu Bala wrote:
>> ...
>> Yes, add them as recommended (or perhaps 'build_requires') modules in
>> Build.PL, then run Build.PL and install the modules when it asks you.
>>
>> Everything should be in Build.PL already. If I missed something,  
>> please
>> add it.
>>
>
> OK, to clarify using the test file Sendu mentioned in a previous post:
> t/SeqIO.t
>
> This test skips tests if Algorithm::Diff, IO::ScalarArray or  
> IO::String
> are not installed (the first two are not mentioned in Build.PL).
> However, if there are a lot of such skips in the whole test suite then
> there maybe few system with all these modules installed in order to
> conduct a complete test. These are the modules I'm referring to.
>
> Nath

If they are only necessary for tests, work for all OSs, and are pure  
Perl they should be added to t/lib, like Test::More and the rest.  If  
they only work for some OSs they could be added to t/lib and skip  
based on OS, but they still must be pure Perl.  I would avoid  
anything that requires any compiling for XS or Inline altogether (I  
don't want to go down the nightmare road of OS-dependent compiler  
issues for a few tests).

Finally, if they are needed for core modules (not just tests) then  
they should be added to the core prereqs in Build.

chris