Hi there,

The make_distcheck_test_suite_step uses a logfiles= keyword arg, which
in turn uses inotify (presumably) to watch a file for a logfile creatd
on it, and to collect info from it.

To my awareness, this has not failed Sourceware yet - however, it is a
fragile mechanism.

DejaGnu provides a way for the directory in which log and sum files are
stored to be altered, see --outdir in
https://www.gnu.org/software/dejagnu/manual/Invoking-runtest.html

This variable is modifiable both through flags passed to runtest and via
Tcl, see
https://gnu.org/s/dejagnu/manual/Command-line-option-variables.html

To test this, I made an adjustment to my ~/.dejagnurc, and ran the GNU
poke testsuite:

  $ cat ~/.dejagnurc 
  set outdir "/tmp/outtest"
  $ make -j17 distcheck
  ...

This, indeed, resulted in a poke.log and poke.sum in the /tmp/outtest
directory.

I believe we should replace the inotify-based mechanism with this method
of redirecting logs.

What do you think?  And, apologies about the lack of patch - I won't be
free for any involved effort at least until the weekend.

Thanks in advance, have a lovely night.
-- 
Arsen Arsenović