[Bug-wget] [Bug-Wget] Issues with Perl-based test suite

[Darshit Shah]

There are a few issues that I've been facing with the old perl based test suite 
that I'd like to highlight and discuss here.

1. The way the test suite has been written, I was unable to hack together a 
  patch that will allow the various tests to be run under valgrind. I'd like a 
  similar functionality like the new Python based test suite where the 
  environment variable, VALGRIND_TESTS causes the Wget executable to be invoked 
  under valgrind for memrory leak checks.
  If anyone could help by contributing a patch / sharing their wisdom on how 
  this can be achieved, I'd be very grateful.

2. Race Conditions: The tets suite seems to have some races somewhere in it. 
  Over the last year or so, I've often seen Test-proxied-https.px fail and then 
  pass in the second invokation. This seemed like some race, but occurred 
  infrequently enopugh to be a pain point. However, Tim's recent patch for 
  using the parallel tets harness seems to be causing more tests to fail for 
  me. Now I have all the Test-iri* tests also failing very randomly and 
  erratically. A second/third/nth invokation of make check will generally see 
  them pass successfully. Without Tim's patch, these tests always passed 
  without issues. I'm loath to believe that the patch itself is the cause of 
  failure. My understanding is that, it is only triggering the issue more often 
  leading to a very high rate of false positives.
  Again, I urge everyone reading this to share their insights on what / where 
  the issue lies and how we can fix it.

In general, I'd like to see the Perl based test suite deprecated in the near 
future. The Python based test suite suffers from none of the above mentioned 
issues and is highly flexible and extendable. The HTTP Server in that test suite 
is feature complete and all tests can now be ported to it. The FTP module 
however does not yet exist and hence, we must keep the perl based tests around 
till that requirement is fulfilled.

--
Thanking You,
Darshit Shah

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