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15.3 DejaGnu Tests

If dejagnu appears in AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS, then a dejagnu-based test suite is assumed. The variable DEJATOOL is a list of names that are passed, one at a time, as the --tool argument to runtest invocations; it defaults to the name of the package.

The variable RUNTESTDEFAULTFLAGS holds the --tool and --srcdir flags that are passed to dejagnu by default; this can be overridden if necessary.

The variables EXPECT and RUNTEST can also be overridden to provide project-specific values. For instance, you will need to do this if you are testing a compiler toolchain, because the default values do not take into account host and target names.

The contents of the variable RUNTESTFLAGS are passed to the runtest invocation. This is considered a “user variable” (see Variables reserved for the user). If you need to set runtest flags in Makefile.am, you can use AM_RUNTESTFLAGS instead.

Automake will generate rules to create a local site.exp file, defining various variables detected by configure. This file is automatically read by DejaGnu. It is OK for the user of a package to edit this file in order to tune the test suite. However this is not the place where the test suite author should define new variables: this should be done elsewhere in the real test suite code. Especially, site.exp should not be distributed.

Still, if the package author has legitimate reasons to extend site.exp at make time, he can do so by defining the variable EXTRA_DEJAGNU_SITE_CONFIG; the files listed there will be considered site.exp prerequisites, and their content will be appended to it (in the same order in which they appear in EXTRA_DEJAGNU_SITE_CONFIG). Note that files are not distributed by default.

For more information regarding DejaGnu test suites, see The DejaGnu Manual.

In either case, the testing is done via ‘make check’.