Re: Passing arguments to test programs during test suite

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Jeff,

* Daily, Jeff A wrote on Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 08:06:56PM CEST:
> I'm using automake 1.11.1's 'parallel-tests' test suite capabilities.  It's
> been fine so far.  I even hacked it a little to support launching my MPI
> programs.  I have some tests that run serially (without MPI) and some that
> do:
> 
> TESTS = $(SERIAL_TESTS) $(PARALLEL_TESTS)
> LOG_COMPILER = \
> maybe_mpi=`if echo "$(SERIAL_TESTS)" | $(GREP) "$$p" > /dev/null; then echo
> ""; else echo "$(MPIEXEC)"; fi`; \
> $$maybe_mpi
> 
> Users run the test suite using something like
> 
> make check MPIEXEC="mpiexec -np 4"
> 
> On one particular platform we don't use MPI but instead have our own process
> manager built into each of our programs.  This means each program must be
> launched by passing command-line arguments such as "-np 4".  How can I do
> this?  I tried:
> 
> LOG_COMPILER = \
> maybe_mpi=`if echo "$(SERIAL_TESTS)" | $(GREP) "$$p" > /dev/null; then echo
> ""; else echo "$(MPIEXEC)"; fi`; \
> tst="$$dir$$f -np 4"; \
> $$maybe_mpi

Make that last line
  eval "$$maybe_mpi"

instead.

> To make things even harder, I have some test programs which take specific
> command-line arguments.  I've been leaving them out of the test suite since
> I can't figure out how to pass command-line arguments to any tests let alone
> individual tests.

We should add support for that.  Right now your best bet is a wrapper
script that transports its options to the programs options.  That
wrapper script can be part of LOG_COMPILER.


If your MPI and non-MPI programs have different suffixes, you could make
things simpler; for example:

TEST_SUFFIXES = .t .t-mpi
T_MPI_LOG_COMPILER = $(MPIEXEC)

FWIW, we still go a simpler way and have a wrapper script for each test.
It sources a defs scriptlet (generated from $(srcdir)/defs.in) that
contains a more-or-less portable shell function to start MPI jobs.
The shell function aims to work also with batch schedulers like qsub.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Ralf