Re: make distcheck creates directory that I don't have write permissions for - is this expected?

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Ed,

* Ed Hartnett wrote on Sat, Nov 05, 2005 at 07:52:01PM CET:
> 
> My current problem is that I have some reference netCDF files, which
> ship with the distribution. I also have a test program, which produces
> data files that need to be identical to the reference files shipped
> with the dist.
> 
> But the problem is the reference files are in the source directory,
> and the test files are in the build directory.
> 
> At the moment, I am doing this with a one-line shell script, which
> does something like this:
> 
> cmp nctest_classic.nc ref_nctest_classic.nc
> 
> What I need to do, apparently, is somehow construct this shell script
> from the Makefile, using $(srcdir) somehow.

This would be one possibility.  You could have a shell_script.in with
  srcdir="@srcdir@"
  cmp "$srcdir/ref_nctest_classic.nc" nctest_classic.nc

and list shell_script in configure.ac as
  AC_CONFIG_FILES([shell_script], [chmod a+x shell_script])

But this is probably even overkill.  You could just export a shell
variable containing srcdir from Makefile to the script -- no need to
construct that at all, then:  If, for example, you use the Automake test
feature, as in
  TESTS = shell_script ...
  check_SCRIPTS = ...
  check_PROGRAMS = ...

then you could just add
  TESTS_ENVIRONMENT = srcdir="$(srcdir)" ...

and use "$srcdir" within the script.  Or, if you have many scripts that
share some initialization, you could just substitute this initialization
part and source that from all shell scripts (by `. ./defs', for example).

> Or is there a way to use some make target for this? Any suggestions or
> web examples would be helpful. I'm going to take another look at the
> info files and around the web. There must be a better way to run this
> cmp test without a whole extra shell script!

Yep.  Examples for test suites are contained in (sorry for the shameless
plugs):
  Automake test suite:  Automake, Libtool-1.5.x
  Autotest test suite:  Autoconf, Libtool-CVS
  DejaGNU  test suite:  GCC

Cheers,
Ralf