Automake supports a two forms of test suite.
If the variable TESTS is defined, its value is taken to be a list
of programs to run in order to do the testing. The programs can either
be derived objects or source objects; the generated rule will look both
in srcdir and `.'. Programs needing data files should look
for them in srcdir (which is both an environment variable and a
make variable) so they work when building in a separate directory
(@xref{Build Directories,,,autoconf}), and in particular for the
distcheck target (see section What Goes in a Distribution).
The number of failures will be printed at the end of the run. If a given test program exits with a status of 77, then its result is ignored in the final count. This feature allows non-portable tests to be ignored in environments where they don't make sense.
The variable TESTS_ENVIRONMENT can be used to set environment
variables for the test run; the environment variable srcdir is
set in the rule. If all your test programs are scripts, you can also
set TESTS_ENVIRONMENT to an invocation of the shell (eg
`$(SHELL) -x'); this can be useful for debugging the tests.
If `dejagnu' appears in AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS, then the a
dejagnu-based test suite is assumed. The value of the variable
DEJATOOL is passed as the --tool argument to
runtest; 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, RUNTEST and RUNTESTFLAGS 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.
In either case, the testing is done via `make check'.
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