Re: What is 'make distcheck'?

[Philip Nienhuis]

Rik wrote:
> 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.

Thanks very much for this explanation. How I wish more OSS projects 
adopted such a procedure...

Projecting those steps on what I do:

- Steps 1 & 2 are done when building the Octave tip in Linux.

- Steps 3, 4 & 5 are done in the mxe-octave build process.

- An intermediate step 5.5 comprises transferring to & installing the 
Octave installer in Windows.

- Step 6 is replaced by running __run_test_suite__ in the just installed 
Octave in Windows.

...and that's about it.

(You probably guess what I'm writing down here:)
I'm wondering what the point of "make distcheck" in mxe-octave is; after 
all, the final test for both Windows and Mac OSX would rather be whether 
the compiled binary works. At least, that's my more down-to-earth (rude 
if you want) perception of "it is very likely to work for users".

The way you describe it looks primarily like a developer target. Now 
that you've explained it I fully understand the point of that; I 
regularly encounter SW that doesn't work because some stupid dependency 
is lacking (e.g., odfdom 0.8.9). But for platforms like OSX and Windows 
I expect very few users are going to build their own Octave.


I think "make distcheck" could in principle be executed on MinGW (i.e, 
natively), possibly with mxe-octave built dependencies.

But alas! mxe-octave natively (= on Windows) still doesn't work. I've 
been mailing privately with John Donoghue this weekend about the various 
hickups I encounter with it. AFAIU it doesn't work for him either using 
 one simple "./mk-dist" command. Some dependencies and maybe octave 
itself still have to built using a "manual" 'make' intervention.

(But I'd like to stress that cross-compiling using mxe-octave works like 
a charm - for me)

Philip