Automake testsuite misuses DejaGnu

[Jacob Bachmeyer]

I was planning to find a solution with a complete patch before 
mentioning this, but since a release is imminent I will just state the 
problem:  several tests in the Automake testsuite misuse DejaGnu and 
fail with the 1.6.3 DejaGnu release as a result.

DejaGnu has always required a DejaGnu testsuite to be rooted at a 
"testsuite" directory and this has long been documented in the manual.  
However, prior to 1.6.3, DejaGnu did not actually depend on this 
requirement being met.  Changes during the development process to 
properly support non-recursive Automake makefiles required relying on 
this requirement to resolve the ambiguity between recursive and 
non-recursive usage.  Several tests in the Automake testsuite do not 
meet this requirement and fail if run with DejaGnu 1.6.3.

The simple change of updating the tests to use a testsuite/ directory 
causes the tests to fail with older versions of DejaGnu, due to lack of 
support for non-recursive "make check" in those versions.  I have not 
yet tried a patch that also switches the tests to use recursive make, 
but I believe that is probably the only way for the tests to pass with 
old and new DejaGnu.

Note that, according to the original author, Rob Savoye, DejaGnu has 
always been intended to require that testsuites be rooted at a 
"testsuite" directory and the behavior that Automake's test cases rely 
on was never supported.

The affected tests are:  check12, dejagnu3, dejagnu4, dejagnu5, 
dejagnu6, dejagnu7, dejagnu-absolute-builddir, dejagnu-relative-srcdir, 
dejgnu-siteexp-extend, dejagnu-siteexp-useredit.

Note that these tests do not all fail with the 1.6.3 release, but will 
all fail with some future release when the undocumented support for a 
testsuite not rooted at "testsuite" will eventually be removed.


-- Jacob