spurious "make check" failure in gzip-1.3.6

[Jim Meyering]

Hi Paul,

I ran the usual build/check iteration and was surprised to see
a make check failure:

    $ make check >& makerr & tail -f makerr
    ...
    m4/xstrndup.m4:  36.9%
    m4/yesno.m4:     34.1%
    makerr:  69.5%
    cmp: EOF on -
    make[2]: *** [check-local] Error 1
    make[2]: Leaving directory `/t/gzip-1.3.6'
    make[1]: *** [check-am] Error 2
    make[1]: Leaving directory `/t/gzip-1.3.6'
    make: *** [check-recursive] Error 1

That's because the file "makerr", was growing while the pipeline progressed.
One way to fix this is to use e.g., $(DISTFILES) rather than the
output of find.  I've included a patch for that below.

A smaller change would be to remove the "-v" option that's responsible
for making "gzip -c" produce the output during that pipeline.

If you opt to keep the "find" command, you may also want to change the "*"
argument to "." -- unless the use of "*" was deliberate -- but the only
name matching ".??*" is ".deps", and there should be no harm in checking
the files in that directory.  I suppose it could be deliberate if the
author presumed that build log file names would always start with ".".

2006-11-25  Jim Meyering  <address@hidden>

        * Makefile.am (check-local): Use the list of files in $(DISTFILES),
        rather than running find on the current directory, in case there are
        non-distribution files (e.g., build log) changing during the test.

--- Makefile.am.~1~     2006-11-25 10:04:32.550257498 +0100
+++ Makefile.am 2006-11-25 10:04:50.449843430 +0100
@@ -60,7 +60,7 @@ SUFFIXES = .in

 # A simple test, just of gzip -- more of a sanity check than anything else.
 check-local:
-       for file in `find * -type f -print | sort`; do \
+       for file in $(DISTFILES); do \
          test -r "$$file" || continue; \
          ./gzip -cv $$file | ./gzip -d | cmp - "$$file" || exit; \
        done