On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 5:12 AM, Stefano Lattarini < stefano.lattar...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > There doesn't seem to be a way to set up my configure.ac such that my > tests > > will run in serial mode on both older and newer versions of automake > > > Since the parallel test harness is already present in Automake 1.11, and > it is in many many ways superior to the old serial driver, my suggestion > would be switch to in your package. But assuming you have good reasons > not to do so ... In general that seems like a good idea. However, the setup for my tests is fairly complex (creating temporary directory structures and files in the builddir for the tests to execute against), and depends on data which is optionally downloaded from the internet (via an optional "make check-download" step, and then the lack of these files being present causes a subset of the tests to be skipped), etc. It's going to be a painful conversion for sure, and the type that's likely to stretch other corner cases in the relatively-new parallel-tests harness. Given I don't really have the extra time to deal with that conversion right now, and the statement in the manual: "This harness is still somewhat experimental and may undergo changes in order to satisfy additional portability requirements" which likely means my complex conversion will hit new snags with further changes to this evolving feature, I'd just rather not convert at this time. What's bugging me right now is that currently I have my own test-runner which takes care of everything and is seen as a single test by automake, and it needs to tell the user things like "Hey we didn't see the optional test data, so we've skipped those tests, run 'make check-download' first if you want to run those tests, but be warned that it will download several megabytes of data from the public Internet.". The default parallel-tests execution in 1.13 hides this info from the user. The reason for the 1.11.6 dependency, by the way, is that current Debian/Ubuntu releases are still on that version. Bumping my requirement to 1.12 would mean anyone working with the code on those platforms would have to download their own local automake update and put it in /usr/local or whatever, which seems silly given I don't really need any 1.12+ features (well, aside from a working "serial-tests" option).
