[libdispatch-dev] [PATCH 2/4] check whether to add -lm for testing to compile

Paolo Bonzini bonzini at gnu.org
Wed Nov 18 09:29:45 PST 2009


On 11/18/2009 06:17 PM, Robert N. M. Watson wrote:
> While a lot of strength comes out of configure.ac's integration with
> shell scripting, it also means there's quite weak syntax checking and
> it can take a long time to find simple bugs that a language with
> stronger typing would catch easily.

In general, the least you rely on shell scripting in configure.ac (and 
push that out to other self-contained macros), the least problems you're 
going to have.

In other words, write configure.ac files as declaratively as possible. 
In principle, with Autoconf you should be able to shuffle your tests 
around completely (though that requires care in writing the macros of 
course).

> (1) Is there a better way to do the MLINKS-like symlink creation in
> man/Makefile.am? In the BSD make framework, you use the MLINKS
> variable to declare a set of additional names for man pages, which
> at install-time result in symlinks. It would be nice if automake had
> a similar primitive, which created symlinks where available and
> copies otherwise, and in particular if the deinstall target knew how
> to remove them. Right now I'm using install-data-hook, probably
> poorly.

I don't think there is one.

> (2) Makefile.darwin runs all the test parts under a harness, and
> then collects and summarizes the results. There's a bit of
> non-portability in the harness still to address (as far as I'm aware,
> Mac OS X is the only system that has the posix_spawn flags required),
> but also I'd like to work from a potted example of how to hook up the
> test parts to the test support described in the automake
> documentation. Is there such a thing around to look at, or can I
> interest some hands in doing this?

I would switch to autotest if you want to use your own harness instead
of Automake's embedded one.

Paolo



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