make check recommended practice?

[John W. Eaton]

On  3-Dec-2007, Moritz Borgmann wrote:

| Now that I'm trying to chase down test failures for my Solaris build, 
| I have a question about the "make check" command.
| 
| Whenever one compiles octave with only a subset of libraries (e.g., I 
| don't include support for sparse matrices since we don't need it), 
| then there is a large number of tests that are known already at 
| configure time to fail. However, when looking at the output of make 
| check or fntests.log, it is extremely tedious to look at every of the 
| currently > 150 failures and determine if it's expected to fail or 
| not.
| 
| How do people solve this problem? Is there some intelligence built-in 
| that could keep the known-failing tests from running in the first 
| place?

We haven't done that because most of us doing development work on
Octave have all the dependencies installed on the systems we use for
working on Octave.  However, I'd consider a patch to avoid tests that
can't work because of missing dependencies.  However, maybe instead of
skipping the tests entirely, the test results summary should at least
have a line with "N tests skipped because of missing build
dependencies".  That way, people would at least be alerted to the fact
that various things are not available because of the missing
dependencies.

jwe