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testingmakefileautotoolsautomakenotice

Anyway to add notice in Automake's make check?

I am refining my Makefile.am file now. The script would skip some non-essential test if the environment does not match the requirement. I want to notify the user that some tests are skipped.

I have tried to add some .PHONY target to TESTS array. Such as:

if HAVE_PYTHON
# something to do with python
else #HAVE_PYTHON
TESTS += skip-python-test
.PHONY: skip-python-test
skip-python-test:
    @echo "Python is not detected"
    @echo "Will skip some test"
endif #HAVE_PYTHON

However, the test-driver checks the existence of those target regardless .PHONY setting. The test-suite.log will be like this:

FAIL: skip-python-test
======================

./test-driver: line 95: ./skip-python-test: No such file or directory

How to refine my Makefile.am? Or what is the best way to do it?

Solution

  • You can add a check-local target conditionally — see Extending Automake for the details. Basically you can make it conditional so that you'd end up with:

    if HAVE_PYTHON
  …
else
  check-local: skip-python-test
endif

skip-python-test:
    @echo "Python not detected, will skip some tests."

    and that should work; alternatively you can do that in configure.ac so that the user can notice right away that they should install more dependencies to have full test coverage.