Re: [PATCH] Fix sloppy tests for silent rules

[Stefano Lattarini]

At Monday 05 July 2010, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

> I noticed on NixOS GNU/Linux that silent*.test would randomly fail (see
> <http://hydra.nixos.org/build/477516>.)  The reason is that these tests
> would fail if “mv” is found in the standard output of ‘make’, but the
> random build directory names used by Nix could very well contain this
> string.
Thanks for the report.  However, this problem has already been fixed in the
master and maint branches of the Automake git repository -- see:
  <http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/automake.git/tree/tests/silent5.test>
  
<http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/automake.git/tree/tests/silent5.test?h=maint>
the relevant line being:
  $EGREP '(mv|ylwrap) ' stdout && Exit 1

> The patch below makes the tests slightly more robust in this respect.
> I’m not sure if this syntax for word boundaries is portable across
> ‘grep’ implementations, though.
According to the autoconf manual, it's not; see the entry for "grep" at:
 
<http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf.html#Limitations-of-Usual-Tools>

Regards,
  Stefano