Re: distchecking without FC?

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Noah,

* Noah Misch wrote on Tue, Jun 19, 2007 at 09:36:06PM CEST:
> On Tue, Jun 19, 2007 at 08:38:49PM +0200, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > * Noah Misch wrote on Mon, Jun 18, 2007 at 07:43:52AM CEST:
> 
> I am somewhat concerned about a developer using `reconfdirs=. ./bootstrap;
> ./configure; make dist' on a fresh checkout and silently losing the
> generated files in the test directories.  With the old mechanism or
> the literal file list mechanism, this cannot happen.  We could fight
> this with a sanity check, like a test on `grep -c Makefile.in
> test-disk.mk'.

Hmm, yes.

> This patch and the literal-file-list one share a further problem: if
> the generated files in test directories are out-of-date, nothing will
> update them.

Indeed.  That's bad.

> The current code gets that right, at least.

Well, this is an argument for showing your latest version of
tests/f{c,77}demo/configure.ac changes to become nonlethal in case of
non-presence of Fortran (77) compilers.  Did you get much further there?

> Alas, I did not expect a clean solution to prove so elusive :(

Oh, I fully expected this issue to be ugly.  Which is why I never took a
good stab at it (sorry for offloading this to you).

> > > +# Bootstrap `.' last.
> > > +case $reconfdirs in
> > > +  . | '. '* | *' . '* | *' .') $AUTORECONF --force --verbose --install ;;
> > > +esac
> > 
> > Why not simple, like above the `find'?
> > 
> > for sub in $reconfdirs; do
> >   test "$sub" = . && $AUTORECONF --force --verbose --install
> > done
> 
> We must bootstrap the test directories first (so the relevant files
> exist), then generate test-dist.mk, then bootstrap the root directory
> (where Makefile.am includes test-dist.mk).

Sure.  That's why I suggested repeating the loop down below again, but
now only picking `.'.  I simply thought that a second loop looks cleaner
(and is probably faster) than a complicated case expression.  But since
we're rather moving away from this patch variant, this minor point
matters little.

Cheers, and thanks,
Ralf