Meson tests are hard to debug in an autobuilder environment
Autobuilders like the ones used in Debian often don't return any artifacts to the developer on failure except for the build job's stdout/stderr, so there should be a way to arrange for the unit tests to produce verbose output (either --verbose
or --tap
; I would slightly prefer --tap
because it's a standardized format) that can be output on test failure.
This is a regression in going from Autotools to Meson: with Autotools, every failing test had --tap
output included in test-suite.log
, and the Debian packaging ran make check VERBOSE=1
, resulting in test-suite.log
being output on test failures.
My current attempts at using Meson for the Debian package have a proof-of-concept patch to add --tap
everywhere, but an environment variable G_TEST_OUTPUT_TAP=1
might be easier to integrate with other build systems (particularly Autotools: see https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=107194 for somewhere this would have been helpful).