13.1.2 When tests fail

Each of the tests in the old test suite are designed to produce no output when they are run via make check. The exit status of each program tells the Makefile whether or not the test succeeded.

If a test fails, it means that there is either a programming error in libtool, or in the test program itself.

To investigate a particular test, you may run it directly, as you would a normal program. When the test is invoked in this way, it produces output that may be useful in determining what the problem is.

Another way to have the test programs produce output is to set the VERBOSE environment variable to ‘yes’ before running them. For example, env VERBOSE=yes make check runs all the tests, and has each of them display debugging information.

The new, Autotest-based test suite produces as output a file tests/testsuite.log which contains information about failed tests.

You can pass options to the test suite through the make variable TESTSUITEFLAGS (see The Autoconf Manual).