Update: after fiddling around I found out that any makefile in the tests subdirectory is ignored, so I probably am missing something when writing my main Makefile.am. After a bit of fiddling around I still have the error output, yet when I run make check-local I get undefined references error
This is not surprising since the gcc command run does not include either the tap files or the main program's c files

YAU(yet another update) I managed to make it work but I did not follow the c tap harness author instructions : I added a line to my Makefile.am so it builds the test executable before running the test suite, that way everything works fine. Still it feels a bit unelegant and like cheating, am I doing things right?

So after some studying I think I'm starting to get autotools to do what I want (at least autoconf et automake) right now I'm confronted with a bit of a conundrum :

For any test programs that need to be compiled, add build rules for them in Makefile.am, simliar to:
tests_libtap_c_basic_LDADD = tests/tap/libtap.a

this line is quite a mysterious : as I understand it, if I have in my tests directory a subfolder containing tests for a specific c file (lets call that test file specific_tests.c) to have the harness run those tests I'd need to add to Makefile.am the following line :

specific_tests_LDADD=tests/tab/libtap.

Thing is if I add this line and then autoreconf I got the following output : 

Makefile.am:10: warning: variable 'specific_tests_LDADD' is defined bu
+t no program or
Makefile.am:10: library has 'specific_tests' as canonical name (possib
+le typo)

[download]

I must add that if I compile specific_tests myself into a specific_tests.t output file make checklocal runs perfectly "

In reply to Re^4: C test suite management with perl by QuillMeantTen
in thread C test suite management with perl by QuillMeantTen

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