CONTRIBUTING: Update instructions about regression tests
Commit Message
Hello,
I thought I'd update the contribution instructions about how to run the
regression tests as the "check-self-compare" target appeared recently.
* CONTRIBUTING: Update instructions about how to launch regression
tests.
Signed-off-by: Dodji Seketeli <dodji@redhat.com>
Applied to master.
---
CONTRIBUTING | 19 ++++++++++++++++++-
1 file changed, 18 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
@@ -38,7 +38,7 @@ visibility of symbols that are part of the API and ABI of libabigail.
Make sure you sign your patch. To learn about signing, please read
the "Sign your work" chapter below.
-One important thing to be before sending your patch is to launch the
+One important thing to do before sending your patch is to launch the
regression tests.
Regression tests
@@ -79,6 +79,23 @@ Please make sure you always launch "make distcheck" before sending a
patch, so that you are sure that we can always build a tarball after
your patch is applied to the source tree.
+A variant of distcheck is "make distcheck-fast". It's like "make
+distcheck" but it's faster. You can just use that one.
+
+A complementary regression checking target is "check-self-compare".
+You invoke it by doing "make check-self-compare". That target
+analyzes the ABI of the libabigail.so shared object, serializes it
+into the ABIXML format and then compares the ABI internal
+representation gathered from the libabigail.so binary against the one
+gathered from the ABIXML format. The two should be equal if
+everything goes right. This is an important regression test. The
+problem is that it can takes twice as much time as make distcheck. So
+we've put it into its own separate target.
+
+So, to be complete the regression checking command to run against your
+patch should be: "make check-self-compare distcheck -j16", if you have
+a machine with a 16 threads processors, for instance.
+
Launching regression tests in Valgrind
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