| The test suite was originally written by Steve McGee and Chris Arthur. |
| It is covered by the GNU General Public License (Version 2), described |
| in the file COPYING. It has been maintained as part of GNU make proper |
| since GNU make 3.78. |
| |
| This entire test suite, including all test files, are copyright and |
| distributed under the following terms: |
| |
| ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Copyright (C) 1992-2019 Free Software Foundation, Inc. |
| This file is part of GNU Make. |
| |
| GNU Make is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the |
| terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software |
| Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later |
| version. |
| |
| GNU Make is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY |
| WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR |
| A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. |
| |
| You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with |
| this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>. |
| ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
| The test suite requires Perl. These days, you should have at least Perl |
| 5.004 (available from ftp.gnu.org, and portable to many machines). It |
| used to work with Perl 4.036 but official support for Perl 4.x was |
| abandoned a long time ago, due to lack of testbeds, as well as interest. |
| |
| The test suite assumes that the first "diff" it finds on your PATH is |
| GNU diff, but that only matters if a test fails. |
| |
| To run the test suite on a UNIX system, use "perl ./run_make_tests" |
| (or just "./run_make_tests" if you have a perl on your PATH). |
| |
| To run the test suite on Windows NT or DOS systems, use |
| "perl.exe ./run_make-tests.pl". |
| |
| By default, the test engine picks up the first executable called "make" |
| that it finds in your path. You may use the -make_path option (i.e., |
| "perl run_make_tests -make_path /usr/local/src/make-3.78/make") if |
| you want to run a particular copy. This now works correctly with |
| relative paths and when make is called something other than "make" (like |
| "gmake"). |
| |
| Tests cannot end with a "~" character, as the test suite will ignore any |
| that do (I was tired of having it run my Emacs backup files as tests :)) |
| |
| Also, sometimes the tests may behave strangely on networked |
| filesystems. You can use mkshadow to create a copy of the test suite in |
| /tmp or similar, and try again. If the error disappears, it's an issue |
| with your network or file server, not GNU make (I believe). This |
| shouldn't happen very often anymore: I've done a lot of work on the |
| tests to reduce the impacts of this situation. |
| |
| The options/dash-l test will not really test anything if the copy of |
| make you are using can't obtain the system load. Some systems require |
| make to be setgid sys or kmem for this; if you don't want to install |
| make just to test it, make it setgid to kmem or whatever group /dev/kmem |
| is (i.e., "chgrp kmem make;chmod g+s make" as root). In any case, the |
| options/dash-l test should no longer *fail* because make can't read |
| /dev/kmem. |
| |
| A directory named "work" will be created when the tests are run which |
| will contain any makefiles and "diff" files of tests that fail so that |
| you may look at them afterward to see the output of make and the |
| expected result. |
| |
| There is a -help option which will give you more information about the |
| other possible options for the test suite. |
| |
| |
| Open Issues |
| ----------- |
| |
| The test suite has a number of problems which should be addressed. One |
| VERY serious one is that there is no real documentation. You just have |
| to see the existing tests. Use the newer tests: many of the tests |
| haven't been updated to use the latest/greatest test methods. See the |
| ChangeLog in the tests directory for pointers. |
| |
| The second serious problem is that it's not parallelizable: it scribbles |
| all over its installation directory and so can only test one make at a |
| time. The third serious problem is that it's not relocatable: the only |
| way it works when you build out of the source tree is to create |
| symlinks, which doesn't work on every system and is bogus to boot. The |
| fourth serious problem is that it doesn't create its own sandbox when |
| running tests, so that if a test forgets to clean up after itself that |
| can impact future tests. |
| |
| |
| Bugs |
| ---- |
| |
| Any complaints/suggestions/bugs/etc. for the test suite itself (as |
| opposed to problems in make that the suite finds) should be handled the |
| same way as normal GNU make bugs/problems (see the README for GNU make). |
| |
| |
| Paul D. Smith |
| Chris Arthur |