better control over the set of checks about l3build

[josephwright]

I'm planning to look at some selectivity for test files by having lvtfiles or similar as a variable. One possible approach to your use case would be to set a Travis-CI variable and pick that up in the build.lua file, and set lvtfiles appropriately. Would that work as an interface for you?

[josephwright]

I've been pondering this a bit. The problem with choosing ...files is that for tests there is quite a bit of manipulation based on the different file types (.lvt, tlg, .log as a minimum, plus auxiliary files, plus now some form of PDF-based files). I wonder if instead testnames would work: the standard setting would then be testnames = {"*"}, and one could restrict as required (perhaps with also excludetestnames to allow selective removal).

Thoughts? (@FrankMittelbach, @wspr)

[josephwright]

I see that this is closely linked to #49: my feeling is that the two issues can be handled together (if one has a list of test names, one can arrange to exclude names by checking the platform or similar).

[wspr]

I’m not sure. For myself I think I would do this with two different build configs, but I can also see the logic here.

[josephwright]

@wspr Yes, but if one provides a testnames variable then you can two multiple configs using one testfiledir, each selecting only some files. That could mean you have a full config that runs everything and a travis config that only runs some tests, for example: you could then arrange that checking on Travis-CI picks the latter, which would then be tests you know don't get messed up by platform-specific stuff.

[wspr]

That does seem quite natural, I agree!

[josephwright]

@u-fischer Does the fix to #49 give you enough flexibility here?

[u-fischer]

I'm not sure that I understood the syntax. Does it mean that I can add to a config file

excludetests= {....}

If yes, what is the allowed content of the variable? Some pattern that is matched against the file name? If yes then I think this would be quite fine.

[josephwright]

@u-fischer Something like

if os.type == "unix" then
  excludetests = {"name-1", "name-???" } -- globs
end

[u-fischer]

Sounds good. Are there restrictions to the glob-syntax? E.g. would *bbb* work, and file[0-9]* work?

[josephwright]

Currently the glob support is 'Windows-like', but the original version of code I've used to convert globs-to-patterns does support ranges too. So I can happily extend the glob support. If you'd rather the names use Lua patterns, I can probably sort that, though it will be a bit more effort.

[josephwright]

I'm assuming we are OK here now ...