On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 12:46 PM, Jim Meyering <[email protected]> wrote: > Jeff Janes wrote: >> Section 5 of the "INSTALL" file for coreutils says that "make >> installcheck" will repeat the self-checks, but using the binaries in >> their final installed locations. >> >> I cannot figure out what "make installcheck" is doing, but surely it >> is not doing that. It doesn't seem to even visit the final installed >> location of the binaries at all. >> >> I tried this against versions 8.16 (tarball), 8.14 (tarball), and the >> git HEAD, on both openSUSE 12.1 and on Cygwin. >> >> I do all the work as non-root, and for ./configure, I always specified >> a --prefix that specifies a not-currently-existent directory name >> within my home directory (and no other options) > > Thanks for the report. > > However, "make installcheck" is a no-op for most packages. Besides, > it would not be useful to coreutils, unless you use a non-default > configuration that would install su, which is normally set-UID (su > is not normally installed). In other words, "make check" is just fine, > since none of these programs act differently depending on whether they > are installed or in the build directory.
OK, thanks for the explanation. I thought that if a package did not implement an option it would give me a "No rule to make target" message, rather than being a no-op. But I guess that that would complicate "make distcheck". Cheers, Jeff
