Re: Generating testsuite at maintainer not build time

[Luke Mewburn]

On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 08:33:20PM +0200, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
  | * Luke Mewburn wrote on Thu, May 20, 2010 at 03:47:04AM CEST:
  | > We then build the software on other systems which often have
  | > an older version of autoconf (e.g, the vendor provided 2.59
  | > on CentOS 5).  This has caused us problems where we've
  | > unintentionally used autotest features & fixes in 2.65 not
  | > present in 2.59
  | 
  | One common idiom for this is to use AM_MAINTAINER_MODE and only
  | --enable-maintainer-mode on those systems where you have new autotools
  | installed.  Note that new Automake allows you to specify the default for
  | --enable-maintainer-mode but older ones doesn't.
  | 
  | 'info Automake maintainer-mode' has some discussion on the subject.

Hi Ralf,

We are already using AM_MAINTAINER_MODE to disable the default
auto-regen functionality; it's the procedure of using
--enable-maintainer-mode on the system we regen on that we
weren't doing.

To fix my issue I've made the following changes:
* Modified tests/Makefile.am so that $(srcdir)/testsuite
  instead of $(builddir)/testsuite is generated.
  This is similar to the current autoconf documentation examples.
* Added an all-local target in tests/Makefile.am to depend
  upon testsuite, so that "make" will regenerate the testsuite
  without requiring 'make check'.
* Changed our procedure for rebuilding configure & Makefile.in
  from "autoreconf" to using "configure --enable-maintainer-mode"
  then "make" on our regen host, and committing those regenerated
  files as well as the regenerated testsuite.
* Remove a build-time package dependency on autoconf (for autom4te).

This works well for us, and removes the dependency on an up-to-date
automake & autoconf on the various build systems.


Thanks for your advice.

cheers,
Luke.

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