15.3 DejaGnu Tests

If dejagnu appears in AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS, then a dejagnu-based test suite is assumed. The variable DEJATOOL is a list of names that are passed, one at a time, as the ‘--tool’ argument to runtest invocations; 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 and RUNTEST 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.

The contents of the variable RUNTESTFLAGS are passed to the runtest invocation. This is considered a “user variable” (see section Variables reserved for the user). If you need to set runtest flags in ‘Makefile.am’, you can use AM_RUNTESTFLAGS instead.

Automake will generate rules to create a local ‘site.exp’ file, defining various variables detected by configure. This file is automatically read by DejaGnu. It is OK for the user of a package to edit this file in order to tune the test suite. However this is not the place where the test suite author should define new variables: this should be done elsewhere in the real test suite code. Especially, ‘site.exp’ should not be distributed.

For more information regarding DejaGnu test suites, see (dejagnu)Top section `Top' in The DejaGnu Manual.

In either case, the testing is done via ‘make check’.