Re: serial-tests option and backwards compatibility

[Stefano Lattarini]

On 01/15/2013 07:32 PM, Brandon Black wrote:
> So my conundrum is this: in automake-1.13, the default switched from serial
> testing to parallel testing.  The only way I can see to disable this is to
> add "serial-tests" to my AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE.  However, my AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE
> also only requires version 1.11.6, which I'd like to continue supporting,
> and these older versions of automake will barf on the invalid option
> "serial-tests" (I also tried "no-parallel-tests", but that's also invalid).
> 
Yes, the "serial-tests" option was unfortunately only introduced in
Automake 1.12.

> 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 ...

> (1.11.6 -> 1.13) without causing an automake error (invalid option) in
> 1.11.6.  Am I missing some tricky method of working around this, or is it
> just not possible?
>
... you might try a trick like this in your configure.ac:

  AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE(
    1.11.1
    dnl Automake version before 1.13 (when the serial-tests option was
    dnl still the default) still defined the badly obsolete macro
    dnl 'AM_PROG_INSTALL'.
    m4_ifndef([AM_PROG_INSTALL], [serial-tests])
  )

It (ab)uses some aclocal and automake internals, but shouldn't break in
the medium term (at least, not until automake 1.11 become irrelevant),
and it appears to work.

HTH,
  Stefano