Subject: Re: bug#11438: make installcheck

From: Jim Meyering <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 08 May 2012 21:46:03 +0200

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.