make check fails due to missing test directory

[Jeffrey Walton]

Hi Everyone,

I'm building 26.2 from sources. My typical workflow is:

  1. unpack tarball
  2. configure
  3. make
  4. make check
  5. sudo make install

The workflow works for about 60 GNU packages I build. However, Emacs fails with:

gmake[2]: Entering directory '/home/build/emacs-26.2/lisp'
gmake[2]: Nothing to be done for 'compile-targets'.
gmake[2]: Leaving directory '/home/build/emacs-26.2/lisp'
gmake[1]: Leaving directory '/home/build/emacs-26.2/lisp'
You do not seem to have the test/ directory.
Maybe you are using a release tarfile, rather than a repository checkout.
gmake: *** [Makefile:943: have-tests] Error 1

How does one tun 'make check' before an install? What special steps
need to be performed?

(I feel like this is an engineering bug in Emacs. I'm baffled 'make
check' does not work out of the box. Only Emacs has this bug).

Thanks in advance.