Bug 12323

Summary:	automake does not support buildtest-TESTS in parallel mode
Product:	[Build System, Metadata & Runtime] OE-Core	Reporter:	Juro Bystricky <juro.bystricky>
Component:	core	Assignee:	Unassigned <unassigned>
Status:	RESOLVED OBSOLETE	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	Medium+	CC:	meta.mr.watcher, meta.watcher, randy.macleod, ross.burton
Version:	2.4.1
Target Milestone:	5.99
Hardware:	x86
OS:	Multiple
Whiteboard:
OS type for building Yocto:	---	Type of Regression:	---
Verified:		Documentation change:	Don't know

Description Juro Bystricky 2017-11-08 18:40:00 UTC

Automake in oe-core is patched with http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky/tree/meta/recipes-devtools/automake/automake/buildtest.patch

where we basically split "make check" into:

make buildtest-TESTS
make runtest-TESTS

We do this in order to build the tests separately (cross-compile them) but
run them later on the target as part of the "ptest" package.

There are two problems with the existing patch:

1. The patch only creates the targets buildtest-TESTS, runtest-TESTS for "serial-test-harness" (https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/html_node/Serial-Test-Harness.html) . This harness is deprecated, and utils default to "parallel-tests". So in order to be able to use buildtest-TESTS target we currently need to patch configure.ac to explicitly select "serial-tests", something like:

AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE(... [serial-tests] ...)

2. The created targets (builtest-TESTS, runtest-TESTS) are not recursive, in spite of what the patch suggests. This may have worked at some time, but it does not seem to work now.  We need to patch configure.ac with an additional patch, something like:

AM_EXTRA_RECURSIVE_TARGETS([buildtest-TESTS])

otherwise not all tests may end up being cross-compiled.

Comment 1 Randy MacLeod 2023-10-24 14:24:40 UTC

Bulk move from 4.99 or 0.00 to 5.99

Comment 2 Ross Burton 2026-01-15 16:29:04 UTC

Closing this, the design of the test harness in automake isn't broken and isn't the problem. Our horrible ways of building and extracting the tests is the problem and is often broken, but this is all worked around in each recipe.

We need to improve how we build and install tests but that's sort of a larger problem.