Simplify test strategy

[MitchellThompkins]

Description

#32 added a CI environment but did so in a very hacky way that I was unhappy with basically immediately. It did let me test test both locally and in CI but by doing some non-ideal searching through files to aggregate all the test files.

This was all in an effort to avoid installing the control package in the docker container because install in the Makefile depends on dist, which depends on docs and the docker image I was using from https://github.com/gnu-octave/docker lacked the tooling to actually build the docs (FWIW I think https://github.com/gnu-octave/octave-buildbot does have the tooling but I don't believe actually builds octave itself and therefore can't be used for testing).

I realized I could just copy the installation makefile recipe and strip out the docs generation stuff. That combined with the fact that I realized __run_test_suite__ existed let me drastically reduce the complexity of the CI environment. It also makes the output much more legible. See the standard octave test results vs what I was doing before (both of those produce 389 tests, but the new version is way cleaner).

The only trade-off is that installation uses git archive which means that for a file to be tested it has to be tracked by git. For files that are already tracked by git I've used git stash create to temporarily grab the hash that would be represented if you were to make the commit. However files that are completely untracked (so new files) won't be picked up at all, so you need to git add them in order to actually test. The trade-off for simplicity seems acceptable to me. I've updated the CONTRIBUTION.md to reflect this as well.

Changes

• Minor copy/paste changes to makefile to copy existing installation recipe
• Drastically reduces the complexity of the script used to run tests
• Updates local test contribution guidelines

[ttl-octave]

Would it be possible to have the identical part of the recipes for both tarballs only once?

[MitchellThompkins]

Would it be possible to have the identical part of the recipes for both tarballs only once?

Yes it would be. I actually did this initially and it's somewhere in my git log but was worried about messing up the release-work flow today and figured it was better just to leave it alone. I can add a commit here that includes that change and I'll try to test that it doesn't break the release build locally, but I think you should definitely verify before merging.

Edit:
I just did this quickly in 6c50cac. Originally I introduced a common recipe that both paths depended on, but I htink define is simpler and clean. The tests run locally and I don't see why the dist wouldn't build, but I'd test it all the same.

Let me know if some thing like this isn't what you had in mind though and I can think about some other ideas.

[ttl-octave]

make dist, install or release are worling as expected.
Thanks for the contribution!