If dejagnu (see Introduction in 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.