Hi Erik,

    * color-tests2.sh and color-tests2-w.sh fail -- logs attached.

Is this with the old make 3.81 from the system, or the new make you
compiled? What is in the "stdout" file in t/color-tests2.dir/stdout?
And, are these the only two tests that fail in the entire suite?

What I see in the log you sent is that color-tests2.log correctly runs 
  make  pass fail skip xpass xfail error
But then the test output only shows the PASS line:
..
make  check-TESTS
^[[0;32mPASS^[[m: pass
+ test_color
..
I believe that is doing "cat stdout", so everything else is missing,
even the Automake "Testsuite summary" footer.

I don't know why. It's as if the output from the parallel running of
make check overwrote itself, or maybe never ran. But this is not a
problem that's ever been reported before (and doesn't happen for me),
and I haven't knowingly changed anything here.

Thus I somewhat suspect this is some problem of make, and/or expect,
and/or something else. If it's something we can detect, we could skip
the test if we can't fix it. Help?

On my system, I see (I'll attach the whole log):
..
make  check-TESTS
make[1]: Entering directory '/u/karl/gnu/src/akarl/t/color-tests2.dir'
make[2]: Entering directory '/u/karl/gnu/src/akarl/t/color-tests2.dir'
^[[0;32mPASS^[[m: pass
^[[0;31mFAIL^[[m: fail
^[[1;34mSKIP^[[m: skip
^[[0;31mXPASS^[[m: xpass
^[[1;32mXFAIL^[[m: xfail
^[[0;35mERROR^[[m: error
^[[0;31m============================================================================^[[m
^[[0;31mTestsuite summary for color-tests2 1.0^[[m
..
+ test_color
..

(For the sake of this mail, I've removed ^M characters and replaced true
^[ ESC character with ASCII ^[.)

BTW, color-tests2-w is just a wrapper of color-tests2 to test VPATH, so
if we can solve color-tests2, its problems should go away too.

Thanks,
Karl