Re: non-recursive make and tests

On Tue, 31 Aug 2004, Robert Collins wrote:

> On Mon, 2004-08-30 at 20:30 -0500, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> > On Mon, 30 Aug 2004, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> > > It would be quite helpful if Automake offered a mode in which it
> > > automatically changed the working directory to the directory where the test
> > > program/script resides and set $srcdir to the relative position in the source
> > > tree to support VPATH builds.  This would emulate the operation of recursive
> > > builds.  Either a global Automake option could be used to enable this
> > > (subdir-tests), or a "RTESTS" (relative tests) mode would be provided.
> >
> > It seems that this topic has not caught anyone's interest since there
> > have been no follow-up posts today.  Surely someone else has converted
> > their recursive project to a non-recursive project and noticed that it
> > is very difficult to get test suites working again?
>
> I found it trivial. Mind you, all my tests are - by design - self
> contained.

Most of the tests for the package I maintain require that the test 
read an existing input file, and write an output file.  Sometimes the 
written result needs to be compared with another existing file.

For scripts I can find the source directory (where input files are 
stored) by doing something like

SRCDIR=`dirname $0`/

in the script.  Unfortunately, this cludge is apparently not working 
if the build directory is under the source tree, so distcheck is 
failing.  Probably another layer of cludges is required. :-)

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