Re: autotest and make distcheck

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Andrei,

* Andrei Kholodnyi wrote on Sun, Sep 12, 2010 at 06:01:01PM CEST:
> > Running testsuite at the "make distcheck" is not a problem but intended 
> > goal.
> 
> Well, then IMO two use cases are mixed here in one.
> I want to check whether my package is built/installed/uninstalled
> properly. This is my first use case.
> And I want to test/or not my installed package. This is my second use case.
> 
> For me check install and test install are two different things.
> Probably installcheck rule is not applicable for the testsuite then
> and e.g. installtest should be used instead.

Well, distcheck (which comes from Automake) really aims to be a "come
on, let me ensure this package is good in all kinds of ways" target,
so it also tries out installcheck.  This makes sense, too, because it
already builds and installs the package somewhere; for packages where
that is an expensive operation, you might not want to do it more often
than necessary.

If your 'installcheck' is not generally usable, then I suggest just not
hooking the autotest testsuite execution to it (i.e., omit the
installcheck-local rule).  If it is generally usable, then I wonder why
it shouldn't work in the distcheck setting for you.

FWIW, I'm not totally against making this more configurable, but so far
I don't see a convincing use case.

Thanks,
Ralf