[CMake] ctest question

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2007-09-24 10:05-0500 Juan Sanchez wrote:

> Hello Alan,
>
>> From your example, what in this statement that causes the test to run
> when I type "make test"?
>
> ADD_TEST(my_first_test diff -q goldenfile testfile)
>
> All it says is to run diff.  How do I tell it to generate the testfile
> from another executable?  How do I tell this executable to run only when
> I type "make test" and not a moment before?

Hi Juan:

In the above simple example "diff" is run only when you run ctest (or I
guess "make test" although I don't use that). So you could do something like

ADD_TEST(my_first_test ${CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR}/create_testfile; diff -q goldenfile testfile)

subject to escaping of ";" which I can never get right until I experiment.
(This general command-line approach of separating commands with ";" only
works on Unix, I believe.)

Then the create_testfile executable is run at ctest time to create testfile
and then diff is run immediately afterwards (which appears to be what you
want).

A better approach would be to put everything you want including the diff
into a configurable script, e.g.,

ADD_TEST(my_first_test ${CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR}/test1.sh)

Note, in this case, the script is configured using CONFIGURE_FILE at
cmake time (basically by substituting CMake-defined variables when needed),
but run only at ctest time.

Our tests don't use diff (because postscript PLplot results are slightly
platform/compiler version dependent because of floating-point rounding
issues), but we do use a configurable scripting approach to generate our
test plots, see
http://plplot.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/plplot/trunk/test/CMakeLists.txt?view=log

I don't recommend you wade through _all_ of that CMake logic and bash script
logic since it is so specific to our PLplot needs (and also its pretty
voluminous/hierarchical since it deals with hundreds of test plots), but I
have given you the above starting reference in case you have trouble
configuring test scripts for yourself using CONFIGURE_FILE.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
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