Re: Generating testsuite at maintainer not build time

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Luke,

* 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.

> I would like to extend the procedure of using autoreconf
> on our "maintainer system" to regenerate tests/testsuite
> to be committed along with configure & **/Makefile.in,
> so that we don't need or use need autoconf on our
> "build and test systems".
> 
> Is there a good pattern for doing this?

Typically, I'd then use 'make dist' on the good system and work with the
extracted tarball on the test system.  This is painful because then the
version control is not available there.  Alternatively, I use an NFS
mount shared between good system and test systems.  As third option,
projects like GCC commit generated files to version control, then use a
special script to update from there that does the equivalent of "svn up
&& touch $list_of_updated_generated_files" together with
--disable-maintainer-mode.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Ralf