Re: $(EXEEXT) in TESTS required?

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Simon,

* Simon Josefsson wrote on Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 02:01:27PM CET:
> While testing mingw32 portability (GNU SASL now builds cleanly 
> cross-compiled to mingw32!) I encountered the following.  It seems 
> $(EXEXT) is required for automake TESTS variables, otherwise 
> 'make' misses out all CPPFLAGS etc:

TESTS which are also executables should be specified in check_PROGRAMS
as well.  Often, tests are scripts.  With generated ones, it would not
be possible to tell the difference at the time `automake' is run.  See
`info Automake Tests' for more information about this.

I think gnulib should add executable tests to check_PROGRAMS rather than
adding $(EXEEXT) as in your example.  Maybe even better would be adding
it to a gnulib-specific variable, and allowing the developer to add that
to both TESTS and check_PROGRAMS -- the duplication you mention is IMVHO
more in the eye of gnulib than of automake.

Which gets me to a more general point: would the additional flexibility
gained from using gnulib-specific variables in Makefile.am snippets be
worth its additional cost of requiring the user to associate them with
Automake variables?  And no, I don't know a general answer here.

Cheers,
Ralf