make check is moaning

[John Ralls]

> On Dec 4, 2015, at 2:22 PM, Wm... <tcnw81 at tarrcity.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> 
> Query: should
> 
> make check
> 
> in the sequence
> 
> make
> make doc
> make check
> make install
> 
> be expected to work?
> 
> ===
> 
> Background: I'm trying to work out why the guile test scripts don't work
> 
> Why: because if neither of the guile or python methods work then our supposed access methods are fucked.  Someone should be able to make one or both of them work in one or more environments.
> 
> Possible issues:
> 
> a) automake version
> b) my understanding of guile and scheme
> 
> ===
> 
> a) automake:
> 
> I've gone backwards and forwards on this
> I think I've read all of the discussions
> I haven't been able to reach a conclusion about which version is expected to work.
> 
> ***
> does anyone know a version of automake that is known to work cleanly with a particular iteration of gnc?
> all I want is the obvious sequence so if anyone can say
> gnc 2.n.n and automake 1.n played happy for me
> that would be great
> I think we are down to personal experience in making sense of this
> ***
> 
> I've tried going backwards in automake versions, that was worse for me. I've settled for
> automake-1.14
> (the most recent and verbose in my standard OS offering) for now because I can live with the warnings and I'm the sort of person that prefers to know what is and isn't working and the spurious stuff is easily ignored.
> 
> For ref:
> uname -a
> Linux Lubuntu64 3.16.0-55-generic #74~14.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Tue Nov 17 10:15:59 UTC 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
> 
> is the 64bit a possible issue?  I don't think it should be but I'm running out of things to guess about.
> 
> P.S. I'm building under Win as we speak in order to answer the same basic question.

In general, yes, make && make check should work. make doc and make install have nothing to do with make check; make doc doesn’t even depend on make being complete. There have been some issues with master for the last few days after I converted the backends to compile as C++ instead of C, but as of yesterday it builds and checks on Debian Jessie, Fedora 20, 21, 22, and 23, MacOSX and Windows. If you’re getting failures please provide details so that we can work on sorting them.

Do note that libtool is imperfect in that it will happily link the wrong library if it finds the installed one before the most recently built one, so if make check is failing try a make uninstall to remove whatever is gnc libs are in libdir. That applies to the python tests as well; python will generally prefer libs in its site-packages dir over local ones.

All versions of automake 1.9 and later are supposed to work. Automake 1.14 and later spews a lot of noise because the maintainer decided to raise a warning over future behavior before adding the functionality needed to avoid the warnings in a lot of cases. I don’t think anyone has tested 1.9 or 1.10 recently, but I’ve successfully done a build with 1.11 (on F18) in the last few weeks. In any case automake isn’t likely to be the cause of make check failures.

Don’t guess, ask. Post the details and we’ll work with you to either fix the problem in GnuCash or get your system sorted out so that it builds.

It’s not X86_64, btw. Alex keeps me on my toes about that.

Regards,
John Ralls