Re: Octave on windows testing

[John W. Eaton]

On 03/11/2016 05:05 PM, Olaf Till wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 10:35:15PM +0100, Olaf Till wrote:
> > Think I'll put my nose into the autoconf documentation again and try
> > to fiddle together something.
>
> I think the best solution is to set, in configure.ac,
>
> CXX=`mkoctfile -p CXX`
>
> before
>
> AC_PROG_CXX
>
> and then check for $GXX. Whatever name in $CXX, AC_PROG_CXX seems to
> check if it corresponds to g++ using a compilation test, so it should
> work.

If you check based on the name of the executable, you could be easily 
fooled.

If you use a test program that has something like

  #ifdef __GNUC__

compilers like clang that sometimes try to pretend that they are 
behaving like GCC can mislead you.

And even if you can reliably determine that the compiler is GCC, there 
may be some time in the future when GCC doesn't support the feature you 
need.  So I think that asking whether you are using GCC is the wrong 
question to ask.

If you really have no better way to accomplish what you want to do (and 
again, I think there must be a better way) then I think the best 
solution is to test for the feature that you need, not try to figure out 
what compiler it is that you are using.

jwe