16.2 DejaGNU Tests

If `dejagnu' appears in AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS, then a dejagnu-based test suite is assumed. The variable DEJATOOL is a list of names which 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 2.5 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.

In either case, the testing is done via `make check'.