Have make also build the unit tests ?

[Tim-Philipp Müller]

On Sun, 2014-03-30 at 10:07 +0200, Edward Hervey wrote:

Hi,

>   I was wondering whether it would make sense to have "make" also
> compile the unit tests code (tests/*) in addition to the libs/plugins ?
> 
>   This wouldn't actually run them (you would still need to explicitely
> use make check for that), but it would ensure that unit tests actually
> *do* compile and would catch API/ABI breaks (because of our code or
> because of dependency changes). It wouldn't increase the build time by
> that much either imho.
> 
>   From a logic (and buildbot maintainer...) point of view it would also
> guarantee that the compilation (which is pretty much what "make (all)"
> represents) is done for everything. And if other steps fail (such as
> make check) they are not compilation failures.
> 
>   Comments ? Remarks ?

Well, I see where you're coming from, and there is a certain logic to
it, but I'm not sure it's really a big enough problem in practice (yes I
know about the issue you just ran into) to warrant changing it, and it
might also be the cause of build failures if we don't catch something
(just saying there are two sides to it).

As a data point, GLib doesn't do this either as far as I can tell.

 Cheers
  -Tim