Re: [PATCH] Fix dejagnu.texi dependency declaration

[Jacob Bachmeyer]

Dimitar Dimitrov wrote:
> On сряда, 16 декември 2020 г. 5:34:46 EET Jacob Bachmeyer wrote:
>   
> > Dimitar Dimitrov wrote:
> >     
> > > This fixes "make distcheck" on my Debian 10 system.
> > >       
> > Thanks; trivial patch applied.  I also cleaned up some other details in
> > the build files while I was looking at them.
> >
> >
> > -- Jacob
> >     
>
> Thank you. But for me on Debian 10 and Fedora 33 the following cleanup patch 
> broke configure:
>
>   Commit 9a4888d2c4369cee3fa415261b3ae55b2057ab2f
>   Use Automake defaults for EXPECT
>
> Error I see with clean GIT top-of-tree, without running autoreconf:
>   $ ./configure
>   ...
>   checking Tcl version 8.5 or greater... configure: error: Tcl 8.5 or greater 
> is required
>
> Can you check if during your tests you have not inadvertantly exported 
> EXPECT=/usr/bin/expect ? I do not see any code to set EXPECT in configure.
>   

That cleanup patch removed the code in configure that was setting 
EXPECT... oops and EXPECT had somehow gotten into the environment in the 
shell I used for tests.

Automake simply expects "expect" to be in the PATH.

In any case, as far as I know, directly testing software versions is 
discouraged in favor of testing for the features actually used.  Worse, 
testing Expect in configure is not completely reliable:  configure could 
find one instance of Expect, while the runtest frontend script finds 
another.

I have also removed the Tcl version test in configure.ac, since DejaGnu 
should work fine with any Tcl released in the last decade or so.  I 
doubt that "too old" versions of Tcl are likely to be found "in the 
wild" anymore.


-- Jacob