Test libraries and executables should be declared EXCLUDE_FROM_ALL

[pdimov]

The Boost convention is that cmake --build . only builds the libraries. Test libraries and executables are built with cmake --build . --target tests.

[Flamefire]

Isn't this the case already through use of boost_test/boost_test_jamfile?

Or did I miss any?

https://github.com/boostorg/locale/blob/f7b1de540351855b0d24d302224b859e958497c6/test/CMakeLists.txt#L39-L44

[pdimov]

Oh, that's examples, not tests.

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Not sure what we're supposed to do with these. I usually treat them as compile tests.

[Flamefire]

In the context of what we have right now it makes sense then I guess I'm still wondering WHY we do that.

The usual workflow for pretty much any software I built so far (and that's a lot given I'm co-maintaining an HPC cluster) is: configure && make && make test && make install (or the equivalent on other buildsystems, e.g. cmake instead of configure)

With EXCLUDE_FROM_ALL we break this "convention" by having make test (or ctest .) be a silent no-op unless make tests is executed before.

I try to go for the least element of surprise and deviating from semi-standard behavior, especially if it leads to silent unexpected results, is surprising.

So what was the motivation? IMO building ALL with make all serves as a smoke test if the library works on the current system/compiler/..., i.e. there are no unmet expectations on that system from the library dev. And when adding/changing something myself I use the ALL target to quickly see if I missed anything obvious. I'll now need to remember to use the tests target for that. Finally having make tests and make test might be confusing

[pdimov]

No, ctest is not a silent no-op, all the tests that haven't been built fail, because the executables aren't there.

IMO building ALL with make all serves as a smoke test if the library works on the current system/compiler/...

But that's not what it does at all. It builds all of Boost, not "the library".

[Flamefire]

No, ctest is not a silent no-op, all the tests that haven't been built fail, because the executables aren't there.

You are right. I confused it with the case that no tests were added at all in which case ctest will succeed without having run anything. There is the flag --no-tests=error to detect that case, which can happen if ENABLE_TESTING was accidentally disable somewhere.

[pdimov]

--output-on-failure and --no-tests=error should have been the default, really. I have a check target that runs ctest with these, but the problem with it is that there's no good way to pass the correct -j to it.