Re: autoconf test failures - how to react?

[Jerker Bäck]

Thanks for the replies
My apologies for the duplicate posts - I became impatient when the post
didn't show up, sorry for that.

> A nice system to test on.  Actually, only GNU m4 1.4.4 should
> be necessary.  Do things change if you use the BSD sed and
> make, instead of GNU sed and GNU make?

Yes, it did! This really blows my mind - and others too I believe. The
general idea among Interix users is that exchanging the original BSD utils
with GNU equivalents is safe and is done frequently. For example, it is
almost mandatory to use GNU make instead of the BSD make. If it is true that
exchanging the original BSD utils is compromising the environment - not
enhancing it with compatible tools - 

So, to find out the reason why I made a new series of compile and tests with
different tool combinations (- autoconf have quite an extensive test!).

* Original Interix with BSD tools - compile and test - no good
* Interix with GNU tools, the same as posted, again - compile and test
  Test 19 - autoupdating with aclocal and m4_include - now OK
  test 222 - AC_STRUCT_TIMEZONE - now OK
* GNU make and Interix BSD sed - compile and test - attached
  ERROR: 278 tests were run,
  6 failed (5 expected failures).
  1 test was skipped.

It seems to me that my GNU sed is unstable (or somewhat incompatible with
Interix), I will try to recompile and test it further. 

> OK.  Let's look at the last failure first.
> Please go into the directory tests/testsuite.dir/222 and issue this
command:
>  abs_top_srcdir=/dev/fs/F/Projekt/dev.sdk/interix/autoconf-2.59c \
>    ./configure -C

Couldn't find out how to do that. I run:
abs_top_srcdir=/dev/fs/<path> ../../../configure -C
which gave:
"configure: error: source directory already configured; run "make distclean"
there first"

----

For your potential interest (in relation to tools):
How to compile for Interix? Since I have a preference for the MS compiler
(for no apparent reason) my build process is rather extensive.
Example: GNU make 3.81 Interix compilation 
1 using Interix gcc: ./configure, make, make check
2 Look up missing dependencies: I use Visual Assist IntelliSense in a
special clean Interix targeted Visual Studio 6 environment - a kind of
Interix reference (fast and easy).
3 Compile and adjust the code in Visual Studio 2005 (posix mode)
4 Build a prefast debug build and test
5 Release posix build with the Windows DDK build tool

Nota bene: The app needs to succeed 3 different build systems.

I believe that most Interix users settle with either 1 or 3. There is also a
possible way to use the cc shell script with make makefiles (the MS compiler
acts as an unix cc), but I found it mostly unreliable (good idea though,
needs improvement).

testsuite.log
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