Re: What is 'make distcheck'?

[Rik]

On 11/03/2013 10:00 AM, address@hidden wrote:
> Forgot to mention:
> I cross-build them by first building Octave on/for Linux and running "make
> check", then do "make all dist" and transplant that <dist>.tar.gz to
> mxe-octave for building.
> How much does "make distcheck" differ from "make all dist"?
The 'distcheck' target is a GNU standard target which performs all of the
operations associated with packaging a distribution and verifying that the
distribution works.  If it passes 'distcheck', it is very likely to work
for users.

Specifically it:

1) Runs 'make all' to verify that the code can be built
2) Runs 'make dist' to verify that a tarball can be created
3) Creates a temporary directory and unpacks the tarball into a source/
directory
4) Creates a temporary build directory
5) Runs 'configure' and 'make' to do an out-of-source tree build
6) Runs 'make check' to verify that tests pass
7) Runs 'make dist' to test that the tarball is sufficient to create
another tarball, as might happen if a distribution patches a few files.
8) Runs 'make distclean' to verify that no temporary files are created
which leave lingering state information and could cause subsequent builds
to fail.

So, on a Linux O/S Octave is passing all this today which is a good thing.

--Rik