Re: RFE: autobuild improvements

[Simon Josefsson]

Eric Blake <address@hidden> writes:

> Would it make sense to improve m4/autobuild.m4 to output a bit more
> information?

Yes.

> For example, I just received a bug report of an automated
> build failure[1,2] managed by the Jenkins autobuilder[3], but while that
> particular setup captures the terminal output of './configure', it did
> not point me to any 'config.log' information, so while I was able to
> learn (from AC_CANONICAL_BUILD) that the host encountering the failure
> was i686-pc-linux-gnu, I didn't get to find out anything about which
> distro it was using, or which gcc version, glibc version, the git hash
> of libvirt.git that was being built, or anything else that would help me
> reproduce the bug easier.  Obviously, it would be nicer for Jenkins to
> report more details on a failed build, but I'm attempting to attack this
> from multiple fronts by asking whether putting more information in
> actual configure output makes sense.

Having autobuild print all those details (when it is able to) seems like
a good idea to me.

> Autoconf already has portable code for putting lots of useful platform
> information in the head of config.log (via the AS_UNAME macro), and it
> might be worth repeating some of that information in actual configure
> output, precisely because some people only log configure output rather
> than hanging on to full config.log.

I agree.  Perhaps we could improve and move the autobuild.m4 code into
autoconf itself?  I doubt most people would object to having this
information printed automatically, but it should probably be made
conditional somehow.

/Simon