Re: Tests fail due to argument list too long

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Bob,

* Bob Friesenhahn wrote on Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 06:24:09PM CEST:
> On a system running the very latest modern release of AIX 4.3.3 I am
> encountering this problem at the end of 'make check':
> 
> PASS: utilities/tests/preview_threshold.sh
> PASS: utilities/tests/preview_wave.sh
> gmake[3]: execvp: /bin/sh: The parameter or environment lists are too long.
> gmake[3]: *** [test-suite.log] Error 127
> 
> The package uses Automake 1.11 with these Automake options:
> 
> AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS = 1.11 subdir-objects parallel-tests color-tests
> dist-bzip2 dist-lzma foreign

Does that error go away if you remove the parallel-tests option?

The list of test logs in GraphicsMagick has a length of 24132 over here,
which isn't surprising to exceed the AIX 4.3.3 limit (see
<http://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/various/argmax/>).  But the old test
suite driver should have had the same problem, as it also expands
$(TESTS) which isn't much shorter (23348 here).

So far we do not know of a portable way (both to different operating
systems and to different make implementations) to work around this limit
in a general way.  With many Automake constructs, you can use multiple
special variables (see the "Length Limitations" node in the manual), but
such a solution has not been implemented in Automake for tests yet.

You should be able to work around it by splitting tests in pieces,
and running things piecewise only for now; assuming the *_TESTS
variables are all nonempty:

  TESTS = $(WAND_TESTS) $(UTILITIES_TESTS) ...

  check-wand:
        $(MAKE) $(AM_MAKEFLAGS) check-TESTS \
                TESTS='$(WAND_TESTS)' TEST_SUITE_LOG=test-suite-wand.log

  check-utilities:
        ...

I agree that it's a bit of a kludge (and I haven't tested it yet).

Cheers,
Ralf