datefudge and faketime

[Simon Josefsson]

Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg at fifthhorseman.net> writes:

> On 03/17/2010 11:06 AM, Simon Josefsson wrote:
>> I've mentioned datefudge in README-alpha now, so I think interested
>> people will find it now.
>
> i don't know about the portability issues, but there is also
> faketime[0]

Interesting, it looks almost identical to datefudge...

> which provides similar functionality (i maintain it for debian, fwiw).
> If it would help the test to reach more architectures or platforms, the
> test suite could select whichever one is present on the system.

I think there are two orthogonal concerns:

1) These tools only work on a smaller set of platforms (at least
compared to all platforms where GnuTLS run on).

2) Most people doesn't have the tool installed even on Debian.

For non-essential things, the way we typically handle #2 is to have the
dependency be optional (like valgrind is now).  If we want to go beyond
having it an optional dependency, we need some way to handle the
platforms where it doesn't exist.

Anyway, I think documenting this requirement in README-alpha is
sufficient.

/Simon