Re: create a big test, collect the fallout

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Eric,

* Eric Blake wrote on Fri, Jul 07, 2006 at 03:12:21AM CEST:
> According to Ralf Wildenhues on 7/6/2006 2:51 PM:
> > 
> > 1) $destdir may not contain slashes: gnulib-tool does `mkdir "$destdir"'
> >    to create it, and `cd "$destdir"; $cmds; cd ..' to enter/exit.
> 
> That also could run into problems if CDPATH is defined and does not start
> with .

Not in this case (except for spurious, but harmless output).  But you
have a point anyway: gnulib-tool is missing some of the portability
head...

> > +  case $destdir in
> > +  */*) func_fatal_error "argument to --dir may not contain slashes" ;;
> > +  esac
> 
> Should we also limit \?

I'd only do that in a sweep making gnulib-tool work well with
backslashes in general anyway.  See sed_trimtrailingslashes for example,
or the computation of self_abspathname.

> > 6) I'd like a megatest that does not test each individual module but
> >    just all of them (I may be patient, but not _that_ patient ;-).
> >    Also I'd like failed checks to make the thingy fail, and configure to
> >    use a cache file whenever possible (due to the fact that the tests/
> >    directory uses a separate configure script, this is a large speedup).
> 
> I agree with the cache idea (we have had several caching bugs in the
> past), as well as the quitting on failure.

This is another point: we should rerun configure with a filled cache and
check for identical output.  This would need some machinery as in the
Autoconf test suite (to grep out spurious difference etc).

> > 9) Autoconf-2.60's AC_CHECK_DECLS_ONCE has two semantic differences
> >    with the one from onceonly_2_57.m4:
> >    - it accepts only one argument (why BTW?  This looks like a bug;
> >      I think it's been discussed here before, but don't remember the
> >      details):
> 
> Actually, autoconf's version takes a comma-separated list.  I think the
> intent was to allow checking for something like struct foo, which contains
> space.  But the workaround compatible to both 2.59 and 2.60 was indeed
> breaking the checks into multiple lines, one decl per check.

Ah yes, thanks for the reminder.

Cheers,
Ralf