Re: tapfiles double-colon rule

["Johnson, Andrew N. via Core-talk" <core-talk at aps.anl.gov>]

Hi Ralph,

On Apr 21, 2020, at 5:23 AM, Ralph Lange via Core-talk <core-talk at aps.anl.gov> wrote:

NB. Ran into a minor bug in make (4.2.1): if you're defining multiple grouped target rules (that use the '&:' separator), make creates bogus warnings about "overriding recipe for target '&'" - the rules work fine, though.

Are you sure that grouped targets are actually available in 4.2.1? They aren’t mentioned in the info pages for my 4.2.1 installation at all, but I did find documentation for them in the online docs for version 4.3. That warning message looks like it thinks the rule is also building a target called ‘&’ and the rules might still work anyway. I probably read about these when 4.3 came out but I don’t think we can use them in Base for a few years.

Thanks for looking at my PR and making those changes. I didn’t think the specific TAPFILES.t (and JUNITFILES.t) variables would be necessary for those static pattern rules, given that the %.t source files wouldn’t exist so Make would look for some other way to create the %.tap files. I assume it didn’t like it though, your change is fine (and maybe faster even if it’s not required).

Please comment on my new .tests-failed $(TEST_FAILURE_FILE) and $(PROVE_FAILURE) mechanism – see the changes in CONFIG_BASE and RULES_TOP for the key parts of that. It could be expanded or changed, it’s basically a way for the runtests and test-results targets to save the test status of a series of tests along with a message, and have those messages output at the end of the build along with returning a success/failure statue. Currently $(PROVE_FAILURE) just captures stdout from $(PROVE) and appends it to the $(TEST_FAILURE_FILE) (which is stored under $(TOP), I will need to merge the files from all submodules in the 7.0 branch), but it looks like we could put more functionality in here if we wanted to.

- Andrew

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