When you ran it separately, did you say BINDIST=YES ? If you didn't then it would have used the inplace package.conf.d, not the bindisttest one. No, I didn't. When I run tests separately I only do 'make TEST=testName'. Should I add BINDIST=YES when rerunning this test or not?
I recently added some "ghc-pkg check -v" calls in the validate script incidentally, so if you log the output of the validate run then that might give some more clues as to when/how it goes wrong. Great. I'll see what error messages I'm getting whenever this happens again.
test_bindist in bindisttest/ghc.mk removes the entire "bindisttest/install dir" tree before installing the bindist there. I noticed that 'make maintainer-clean' doesn't remove "bindisttest/a", but I'm not sure if that is relevant here. I admit I don't understand structure of this test.
Janek