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13.3 The distcheck rule
The make dist documentation sounds nice, and make dist did
do something, but how do you know it really works? It is a terrible
feeling when you realize your carefully crafted distribution is missing
a file and won't compile on a user's machine.
I wouldn't write such an introduction unless Automake provided a
solution. The solution is a smoke test known as make distcheck .
This rule performs a make dist as usual, but it doesn't stop
there. Instead, it then proceeds to untar the new archive into a fresh
directory, build it in a fresh build directory separate from the source
directory, install it into a third fresh directory, and finally run
make check in the build tree. If any step fails,
distcheck aborts, leaving you to fix the problem before it will
create a distribution.
While not a complete test -- it only tries one architecture, after all
-- distcheck nevertheless catches most packaging errors (as
opposed to portability bugs), and its use is highly recommended.
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