Re: exit status of 'make check'

[Michael Elizabeth Chastain <mec@shout.net>]

I agree with Daniel here, but from a different point of view.

It would be nice if the exit status was, for example:

  0  no results are ERROR, WARNING, or FAIL
  1  no results are ERROR or WARNING; some results are FAIL
  2  some results are ERROR or WARNING
  3  the test harness did not run well enough to generate results
     (e.g. runtest not found).

(or something like that)

To achieve this result, someone would have to: design a set of exit statuses,
build consensus for it among several user communities, and submit patches to
tools like dejagnu.

That's a lot of work.  For the same amount of work, one could implement other
useful features in the test machinery and in the test suite itself.  For
instance, I would like to have ERRORs and WARNINGs reported with the test
script filename in them, just like FAILs are.

I do sympathize that the exit status is imprecise and that this can
interfere with large-scale automation.

Michael C