Re: `make check -j` fails when building GNU Make from source

[Alejandro Colomar]

Hi Paul,

On 4/3/23 14:26, Paul Smith wrote:
> On Sun, 2023-04-02 at 18:14 +0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
>> I wonder if you could use the Makefile to run the tests, rather
>> than calling a script from a .PHONY target that runs them all the
>> time.  Why not run them only once?  You can touch empty files
>> when a test succeeds to make make(1) happy (I usually call them
>> *.touch files).
> 
> I don't quite understand what you mean by "why not run them only once".
> They are run only once...?
> 
> Maybe you mean, if (a) the make binary hasn't been rebuilt and (b) the
> test script hasn't been changed, then we wouldn't need to re-run the
> test?

Yes, I meant that.

>  Perhaps, but realistically I'm not sure it's worth the effort to
> make this change because almost the only time we ever run these tests
> is when we've rebuilt the make binary, and it's easy enough to run just
> a single test if we want to.

A few beneifts:

-  Being part of the make targets, it would enable running them in
   parallel, taking around 1/4th the time it takes now.

-  If you run them several times, you only get rerun the ones that
   failed (especially if you run with -k) or didn't yet run.  This
   allows interrupting the job and restarting (as I did).

But of course, I'm not going to tell you all of the benefits that a
Makefile has over a shell script.  :)

Cheers,
Alex

-- 
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