Re: non-recursive make and tests

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Mon, 30 Aug 2004, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:

> The $(srcdir) value passed is often essentially useless since it may just be 
> '.'.  It is difficult for the Makefile to produce better values except for 
> perhaps offsets from @abs_top_srcdir@ and @abs_top_builddir@ substitutions. 
> It may also be possible to play games by passing back-ticked shell script 
> fragments rather than normal values in the TESTS_ENVIRONMENT specification.
>
> Regardless, the tests themselves should not have to know their position in 
> the source or build tree.

If I add this sort of junk to the top of my test scripts then they 
seem to pass the tests:

set -e
SRCDIR=`dirname $0`
SRCDIR=`cd $SRCDIR && pwd`
TOPSRCDIR=`cd $srcdir && pwd`
cd utilities || exit 1

MODEL_MIFF="${TOPSRCDIR}/Magick++/demo/model.miff"
.
.
.

Without the pwd's distcheck can't pass since srcdir may be passed as a 
useless '.'.

Unfortunately, with hundreds of such scripts, altering the test 
environment to convert to a non-recursive make is quite a penalty.

Many scripts could be one-liners if Automake can produce a 
per-directory test environment.

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