Re: autotest and make distcheck

[Andrei Kholodnyi]

On Sun, Sep 12, 2010 at 6:19 PM, Ralf Wildenhues <address@hidden> wrote:
> 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.

I see your point here, of cause it makes sense.
However how it will work e.g. in a case of cross-compile?
I can do build/install/uninstall it on my host but testsuite will
always fail since it is for the different HW.

> 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.

Well, if some tests fail then installcheck fails as well.
But tests could fail e.g. due to known bugs etc,
and it should not prevent me from checking whether install/deinstall
of my package works properly.
At the moment I can not run my make installcheck.

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

I'm rather trying to understand whether I can reach my aims using
existing rules.
Probably as you have mentioned installcheck-local is not a suitable
rule in my case.

However I'm wondering how people are running make installcheck then,
if some tests fail due to known reasons?