Re: non-recursive make and tests

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Tue, 31 Aug 2004, Gary V.Vaughan wrote:
> > Many scripts could be one-liners if Automake can produce a per-directory 
> > test environment.
>
> I made a stab at converting libtool to non-recursive make last year (I think) 
> and had much the same problem.  I think the general solution is to move to an 
> Autotest based testsuite, where the input files are generated by the test 
> rather than searched for in the source tree.  Maybe you can emulate that 
> behaviour by making your test input into here documents in the test scripts, 
> without a whole scale move to Autotest?

That sounds great, but in my case the input files are graphic image 
files so they would be rather unwieldy in here documents.  Typically 
a file is read, processed using an algorithm, and then either its 
checksum is compared with a reference checksum, or the final output is 
compared with reference data.

There are lots of other types of software packages with tests that 
have similar requirements.

The easiest solution is to update the check-TESTS: definition in 
automake's lib/am/check.am file so that it has an option to emulate 
the way a test would traditionally be executed by a recursive build. I 
can hack my copy of Automake, but then the resulting project can't be 
re-created by someone else.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden
http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen