Build or rebuild binary target when tests are run

[andy5995]

For script-based tests I need meson to build or rebuild the binary.

The binary target is created in the top-level meson.build. The script-based tests are in tests/meson.build.

Is there a way to build the binary target when meson test is run?

[andy5995]

This is a case where the answer is in the docs.

I add a test setup for the main binary target and set parallelism to false

test('build binary', main_bin, is_parallel : false)

https://mesonbuild.com/Unit-tests.html#test-parameters

https://mesonbuild.com/Unit-tests.html#parallelism

And the fix magically appears at:

theimpossibleastronaut/rmw#396

[eli-schwartz]

Pretty sure what you want here is depends: main_bin, see https://mesonbuild.com/Reference-manual_functions.html#test

specifies that this test depends on the specified target(s), even though it does not take any of them as a command line argument. This is meant for cases where test finds those targets internally, e.g. plugins or globbing.

By adding a test that executes main_bin without args and expects it to return success, all you do is make the entire test suite depend on that bin before running any tests, but depends: does the same job except better -- it also works when you run

meson test single_test_name

[andy5995]

Yeah, that's what I want. Thanks @eli-schwartz