[jira] Commented: (SUREFIRE-184) [PATCH] make the basedir system property optional

["Sean Flanigan (JIRA)" <ji...@codehaus.org>]

    [ http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/SUREFIRE-184?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=150265#action_150265 ] 

Sean Flanigan commented on SUREFIRE-184:
----------------------------------------

I've just run into this; actually I ran into it last week, but it took me until yesterday to find a workaround (programmatically overriding Ant's basedir, eww), and then today finding the real cause.  I now know way more about Ant's and Maven's innards than I wanted to!

I'm trying to test an Ant task by running an Ant build file from a subdirectory.  So I have a test case/class which extends org.apache.tools.ant.BuildFileTest and passes it the name of an Ant build file.  BuildFileTest, which extends JUnit's TestCase, is part of the test suite for Ant itself and its built-in tasks.

The problem is, the system property "basedir" set by Surefire (the base directory of the Maven project) conflicts with Ant, because the "basedir" attribute of a build.xml (base directory of an Ant project) can be overridden via the system property "basedir".  A classic namespace collision.  Both equally at fault, I suppose, but Ant /was/ there first!

Thus when my Ant task test looks for files using paths which relative to the the subdirectory, it can't find them because basedir is now pointing to the root of the Maven project, not the basedir of the Ant test build.

As Dan suggested, it is possible to unset basedir in the test class(es), but that seems like the wrong approach.  I'd prefer that my test cases were independent of the test environment, without adding in environment-specific workarounds.  

What is the expected use of Surefire's basedir system property, within a JUnit test?  Who uses it?  Perhaps the property could be renamed, perhaps as "maven.basedir".  A test case which used this property would be Maven-dependent; might as well be explicit about it.  (Or better still, avoid such dependencies entirely!)

Sean.


> [PATCH] make the basedir system property optional
> -------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: SUREFIRE-184
>                 URL: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/SUREFIRE-184
>             Project: Maven Surefire
>          Issue Type: Improvement
>         Environment: tested on Win2K with cygwin and JDK1.5, but this is indifferent.
>            Reporter: Antoine Levy-Lambert
>             Fix For: 2.x
>
>         Attachments: patch.txt
>
>
> I wanted to run the ant testcases using the maven-surefire-plugin (I actually built all the ant jars using maven).
> The problem is that the plugin sets a system property basedir that ant cannot override. Since the BuildFileTest s are heavily dependent upon this property that ant normally sets to be the directory of the build file, most tests fail ...
> Here a patch adding the possibility not to set the basedir by setting a configuration attribute omitbasedir to true. 
> The pom.xml of maven-surefile-plugin was also missing a dependency to surefire-api (or at least I needed to add this to build properly).
> Regards,
> Antoine

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