bug#9213: aclocal7.test of automake 1.8.3 fails on s390/s390x

[Stefano Lattarini]

Hello Philip.

On Monday 01 August 2011, Philipp Thomas wrote:
> When building automake on s390 I get the following failure when running the
> testsuite. Is there possibly a more detailed log that would help pinpoint
> the exact failure?
> 
> === Running test ./aclocal7.test
> /usr/src/packages/BUILD/automake-1.8.3/tests/testSubDir
> DIST_COMMON = README $(am__configure_deps) $(srcdir)/Makefile.am \
> FAIL: aclocal7.test
> 
Whow, 1.8.3 is more than seven years old.  Have you considerded upgarding
to the latest version 1.11?  It offers many new interesting features, and
it's being actively developed (and its testsuite has grown decent logging
capabilities).

That said, if you really need to debug the problem with that old automake
version, here are some tips I hope you'll find useful.

Assuming that you have already configured and built your automake tree,
you can use the following idiom to get the verbose output from a single
test:

  $ cd tests
  $ keep_testdirs=yes ./aclocal7.test 2>&1 | tee aclocal7.log
  $ mv testSubDir aclocal7.dir

and this idiom to get the verbose output from the whole testsuite:

  $ make check VERBOSE=x 2>&1 | tee test-suite.log

But notice that this last usage will still remove all the temporary
files and directories used by the tests (even the failed ones), which
will make debugging considerably more difficult, especially in case
of intermittent failures.

HTH,
  Stefano