Hi,
When the AC_TRY_RUN macro runs a program, it invokes it with the simple
command
./a.out
When cross-compiling, obviously, this test will fail or produce output
that isn't correct for the target platform.
However, on some multiprocessor machines with a separate execution node,
it's possible to run test executables if they're preceded by a special
invocation command. For instance,
yod ./a.out
will run and produce informative results.
For our automated tests, we set a value we call RUNSERIAL to invoke each
test (using either a homebrew invocation or automake's TEST_ENVIRONMENT
variable). It would be great if we could do the same thing in configure.
For instance, wedging a script that looks a little like this pseudocode:
if [ $RUNSERIAL != "" ]; then
$RUNSERIAL ./conftest
else
./conftest
in the AC_RUN_IFELSE macro would let us run tests on these
strange platforms without needing to edit the configure script ourselves.
I suspect that the "proper" autoconf answer is that we should run these
tests at build-time rather than at configure time. I would argue that
this isn't exactly the cross-compiling case, because we really do have the
target machine present. We just need to feed it the executables in the
correct way. Also, it would take a lot of effort to port all of these
tests from configure. :)
James Laird
Configuration and Build Support, HDF5
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