make check recommended practice?

[Moritz Borgmann]

Now that I'm trying to chase down test failures for my Solaris build, 
I have a question about the "make check" command.

Whenever one compiles octave with only a subset of libraries (e.g., I 
don't include support for sparse matrices since we don't need it), 
then there is a large number of tests that are known already at 
configure time to fail. However, when looking at the output of make 
check or fntests.log, it is extremely tedious to look at every of the 
currently > 150 failures and determine if it's expected to fail or 
not.

How do people solve this problem? Is there some intelligence built-in 
that could keep the known-failing tests from running in the first 
place?

Thanks,

Moritz