Re: verbose testsuite output contains 1M newlines

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Eric,

* Eric Blake wrote on Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 03:14:21PM CEST:
> According to Ralf Wildenhues on 11/23/2008 9:37 AM:
> > Maybe we can have AT_CHECK modifiers or sister macros that allow to
> > specify that some output may not be suitable for the screen or the log
> > file, due to size or content such as control characters.
> 
> Here's my proposal for the autotest side - ignore-nolog, stdout-nolog, and
> stderr-nolog.  If you like this, then I can follow up with an m4 patch to
> use them on the particular tests where we really don't need to see 1M of
> newlines.

Almost.  It seems inconsistent that only ignore-nolog allows non-text
output.  What about ensuring that std{out,err}-nolog do likewise, by
sending some large lines to all three in a test?

Also, can we use 'diff' for comparing non-text files?  POSIX seems to
say yes, and autoconf.info doesn't disagree, but my memory isn't clear
on this.  A test could find this out for us.

Thanks,
Ralf