Re: FYI, temporary "make check" build requirement

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Jim,

* Jim Meyering wrote on Thu, Nov 01, 2007 at 12:59:49PM CET:
> I noticed some minor of "make check" failures.
> Once you've built autoconf, if you want to run "make check" with some
> other version of autoconf tools in your path, here's what you have to
> do in order to avoid a couple of spurious test failures due to version
> string mismatch:
> 
>   touch configure.ac && PATH=$PWD/tests:$PATH make check
> 
> That ensures that all of the generated files are regenerated
> using the just-built tools, rather than the ones in your path.

Your workaround only works if you build in-tree, i.e., if you do
non-VPATH builds.

If we stick to leaving generated files out of the git repo,
we should make the testsuite pass with the range of tools
that our build system allows.  That is, we currently have
  AC_PREREQ([2.59])
  ...
  AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([1.7.9 ...])

and we require m4 >= 1.4.5 (unless $M4 is set).  So either we make
the above strict enough so that the current test suite passes, or
write a bootstrap script that does a self-bootstrap, or refuse to
run the test suite without a regeneration, or we relax the test
suite.  We definitely (well, at least me) don't want even more
noise due to false failure reports.

For this, it would help if you posted those spurious test failures.

This is what I found with a casual check: 2.59 is not sufficient,
but Automake 1.7.9 seems to be.  I'll applied the patch below, if
nobody disagrees.

FWIW, with m4 1.4.5, test 125 (Define a newline) fails due to the
changed error line number reporting of m4:
| -configure.ac:5: warning: AC_DEFINE: `one
| -configure.ac:5: two' is not a valid preprocessor define value
| +configure.ac:6: warning: AC_DEFINE: `one
| +configure.ac:6: two' is not a valid preprocessor define value

Thanks,
Ralf

2007-11-02  Ralf Wildenhues  <address@hidden>

        * configure.ac (AC_PREREQ): Require version 2.60, for
        AC_PROG_SED, AC_PROG_GREP.

diff --git a/configure.ac b/configure.ac
index 4f9a71e..3a79310 100644
--- a/configure.ac
+++ b/configure.ac
@@ -17,8 +17,8 @@
 # You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
 # along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
 
-# We need AC_CONFIG_TESTDIR.
-AC_PREREQ([2.59])
+# We need AC_CONFIG_TESTDIR, AC_PROG_SED, AC_PROG_GREP.
+AC_PREREQ([2.60])
 
 AC_INIT([GNU Autoconf], m4_esyscmd([build-aux/git-version-gen .version]),
        address@hidden)