The test suite was originally written by Steve McGee and Chris Arthur. It is covered by the GNU General Public License (Version 2), described in the file COPYING. It has been maintained as part of GNU make proper since GNU make 3.78. The test suite has a number of problems which should be addressed. One VERY serious one is that there is no real documentation. You just have to see the existing tests. Use the newer tests: many of the tests haven't been updated to use the latest/greatest test methods. See the ChangeLog in the tests directory for pointers. The second serious problem is that it's not parallelizable: it scribbles all over its installation directory and so can only test one make at a time. The third serious problem is that it's not relocatable: the only way it works when you build out of the source tree is to create symlinks, which doesn't work on every system and is bogus to boot. The fourth serious problem is that it doesn't create its own sandbox when running tests, so that if a test forgets to clean up after itself that can impact future tests. The test suite requires Perl. These days, you should have at least Perl 5.004 (available from ftp.gnu.org, and portable to many machines). It used to work with Perl 4.036 but official support for Perl 4.x was abandoned a long time ago, due to lack of testbeds, as well as interest. The test suite assumes that the first "diff" it finds on your PATH is GNU diff, but that only matters if a test fails. To run the test suite on a UNIX system, use "perl ./run_make_tests" (or just "./run_make_tests" if you have a perl on your PATH). To run the test suite on Windows NT or DOS systems, use "perl.exe ./run_make-tests.pl". By default, the test engine picks up the first executable called "make" that it finds in your path. You may use the -make_path option (ie, "perl run_make_tests -make_path /usr/local/src/make-3.78/make") if you want to run a particular copy. This now works correctly with relative paths and when make is called something other than "make" (like "gmake"). Tests cannot end with a "~" character, as the test suite will ignore any that do (I was tired of having it run my Emacs backup files as tests :)) Also, sometimes the tests may behave strangely on networked filesystems. You can use mkshadow to create a copy of the test suite in /tmp or similar, and try again. If the error disappears, it's an issue with your network or file server, not GNU make (I believe). This shouldn't happen very often anymore: I've done a lot of work on the tests to reduce the impacts of this situation. The options/dash-l test will not really test anything if the copy of make you are using can't obtain the system load. Some systems require make to be setgid sys or kmem for this; if you don't want to install make just to test it, make it setgid to kmem or whatever group /dev/kmem is (ie, "chgrp kmem make;chmod g+s make" as root). In any case, the options/dash-l test should no longer *fail* because make can't read /dev/kmem. A directory named "work" will be created when the tests are run which will contain any makefiles and "diff" files of tests that fail so that you may look at them afterward to see the output of make and the expected result. There is a -help option which will give you more information about the other possible options for the test suite. Any complaints/suggestions/bugs/etc. for the test suite itself (as opposed to problems in make that the suite finds) should be handled the same way as normal GNU make bugs/problems. Paul D. Smith Chris Arthur