Re: How to check installed binaries using the same tests in the source code?

[Simon Josefsson]

For what’s its worth, I added support for this in recent libidn releases so that distribution maintainers can run tests/standalone.sh in an unpacked (but not built) tarball and it will run the tests-suite on the system-installed package.  I think this is a good pattern: running “make check” is usually heavily tied into the build infrastructure. But the self tests in upstream are often what you want to run on the system-installed package to make sure it works. There is no standard way to do this in Autotools. Sometimes standalone testing catches problems that “make check” fail to catch, for things related to the installation (or just random reasons).

https://salsa.debian.org/debian/libidn/-/blob/master/NEWS?ref_type=heads#L19

/Simon

6 jan. 2025 kl. 13:48 skrev Santiago Vila <sanvila@debian.org>:

Hello.

For our Debian CI framework (ci.debian.net)
we are adding tests to every package, called
autopkgtests.

The gettext package already has a "make check"
target, but it checks the just-built package,
not the installed version in /usr which
is what we would need for the CI framework.

Somebody suggested the trick of symlinking the
executables to their /usr-installed counterpart
before running make check, but it would be great
if there was already some Makefile target
to achieve that "out-of-the-box".

(I see there is an "installcheck" target, which apparently
checks for --version and --help but I think nothing else)

Thanks.