building GNU make 4.0 without guile on Linux

[Alexander Stohr]

Hello,

I tried building GNU make 4.0 on a Linux platform
that comes with insufficient or rather no guile support.
The platform I used was Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
with a kernel 2.6.32-38 for i686 SMP.

A first straight forward compile attempt helped me
hammering out any missing development packages.
In the end the make build failed for missing guile.
For that distro version only up to guile 1.6/1.8 is in the apt "shop".
And with that versions guile was honored
but when linking a set of symbols were not resolvable.

Taking the easy path I decided to simply disable guile at configure time
as its offered in a quite similar fashion for the win32 platforms.

        ./configure --without-guile --with-guile=no

(both options were accepted without warning. They might be equivalent and thus 
redundant.)

When linking I got the very same symbol errors all over.
Obviousely guile.c/.o was still a part of the linkage process.

Doing a `make clean` and adding an '#if 0' / '#endif' pair
to the start and end of the source file guile.c was choosen
as a work around for further testing. Now compilation and
linking succeeded nicely. GNU make 4.0 was built.
I installed it for my user account in order to proceed.

Now going for the built in test set of the packgage
I found two things to fail for reasons I am not sure.
It's the features/load and the features/loadapi test.
Even if guile is not available it should be a "skip"
in the scope of the test and probably not a "fail".
See my test log excerpt below for details. 

Rationale & supposed issues:
1) Checking for a minimum guile versions needs some improvement in ./configure.
2) Building of src on Linux without guile does not work out of the box for that 
version. (guile.c was always on/in)
3) Some of the tests do fail afterwards - these might be true errors of either 
make or of the test suite.
4) Some tests are regarded as failures even if the associated feature is absent 
by intention.

Regards, Alex.


------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     Running tests for GNU make on Linux machinename 2.6.32-38-generic-pae i686
                                 GNU Make 4.0
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Clearing work...
Finding tests...

features/archives ....................................... ok     (10 passed)
features/comments ....................................... ok     (1 passed)
[...]
features/include ........................................ ok     (10 passed)
features/jobserver ...................................... ok     (2 passed)
features/load ........................................... Error running 
/home/username/bin/make-4.0 (expected 0; got 32512): 
/home/username/bin/make-4.0 -f work/features/load.mk.1
Error running /home/username/bin/make-4.0 (expected 0; got 32512): 
/home/username/bin/make-4.0 -f work/features/load.mk.2
Error running /home/username/bin/make-4.0 (expected 0; got 32512): 
/home/username/bin/make-4.0 -f work/features/load.mk.3
Error running /home/username/bin/make-4.0 (expected 0; got 32512): 
/home/username/bin/make-4.0 -f work/features/load.mk.4
Error running /home/username/bin/make-4.0 (expected 0; got 32512): 
/home/username/bin/make-4.0 -f work/features/load.mk.5
FAILED (1/6 passed)
features/loadapi ........................................ Error running 
/home/username/bin/make-4.0 (expected 0; got 32512): 
/home/username/bin/make-4.0 -f work/features/loadapi.mk.1
Error running /home/username/bin/make-4.0 (expected 0; got 32512): 
/home/username/bin/make-4.0 -f work/features/loadapi.mk.2
Error running /home/username/bin/make-4.0 (expected 0; got 32512): 
/home/username/bin/make-4.0 -f work/features/loadapi.mk.3
FAILED (1/4 passed)
features/mult_rules ..................................... ok     (2 passed)
features/mult_targets ................................... ok     (2 passed)
 [...]
functions/flavor ........................................ ok     (1 passed)
functions/foreach ....................................... ok     (4 passed)
functions/guile ......................................... N/A
functions/if ............................................ ok     (1 passed)
functions/join .......................................... ok     (1 passed)
[...]
variables/special ....................................... ok     (2 passed)
variables/undefine ...................................... ok     (4 passed)

10 Tests in 3 Categories Failed (See .diff* files in work dir for details) :-(