Created attachment 1244877 [details]
Fedora patch to enable make check

The PIC failure is because the custom Vala build rules do not pass through the -fPIC argument from CFLAGS. Fixing that involves adding "-X -fPIC" to VALA_TESTS_FLAGS (in libsecret/Makefile.am). Once that is done, you realise that the test suite relies on various Python modules that are not checked in configure (at least dbus-python and gi, in other words pygobject). Once those are installed, you then find that the test suite relies on a running D-Bus session bus, which is neither set up nor verified by the test rules. Then, some tests use Python 2 and some use Python 3, meaning that both versions of pygobject are required. Additionally, gjs is required for the JavaScript tests. Finally, a further patch from upstream git is required to fix a missing define when building a Vala test, as the define is again not passed through to the compiler invoked by valac.

I can only guess that the test suite is not meant to be run by people who are not libsecret developers.

Enabling the test suite does not block the rebase of libsecret to a newer version, as it is a feature request and not a regression between the current version and the rebase. I would happily close this as UPSTREAM, given that the test suite in the released version is broken (the Vala test alone causes a test to fail). However, I have a locally-modified .spec with a couple of patches that allows the tests to pass, so I will look at writing the relevant configure checks and filing an upstream bug. And then fixing the Fedora package. And finally fixing the RHEL package.

Thank you very much for the work you put into this.

(In reply to David King from comment #1)
> The PIC failure is because the custom Vala build rules do not pass through
> the -fPIC argument from CFLAGS. Fixing that involves adding "-X -fPIC" to
> VALA_TESTS_FLAGS (in libsecret/Makefile.am). Once that is done, you realise
> that the test suite relies on various Python modules that are not checked in
> configure (at least dbus-python and gi, in other words pygobject). Once
> those are installed, you then find that the test suite relies on a running
> D-Bus session bus, which is neither set up nor verified by the test rules.
> Then, some tests use Python 2 and some use Python 3, meaning that both
> versions of pygobject are required. Additionally, gjs is required for the
> JavaScript tests. Finally, a further patch from upstream git is required to
> fix a missing define when building a Vala test, as the define is again not
> passed through to the compiler invoked by valac.

None of these seems like completely stop-the-press problem. We probably would need an option to switch of Python3-requiring tests, but I don’t see it as a problem to run tests inside of gnome-session and have additional requirements.

> I can only guess that the test suite is not meant to be run by people who
> are not libsecret developers.

That is obvious, but could it be modified so that it could be run with
developers held QA hands from a distance?

> Enabling the test suite does not block the rebase of libsecret to a newer
> version, as it is a feature request and not a regression between the current
> version and the rebase.

Certainly. Thank you again.