Re: Problem with dejagnu.am

[Alexandre Duret-Lutz]

>>> "Mark" == Mark Mitchell <address@hidden> writes:

 Mark> In dejagnu.am there is:

 Mark> ## Flags for DejaGNU.
 Mark> RUNTESTFLAGS =

 Mark> As far as I can tell, all that does is:

 Mark> (a) Make for confusion if the Makefile.am sets that variable
 Mark> elsewhere, and

Any setting in Makefile.am overrides the default setting
supplied by Automake.  This applies to all variables and almost
all rules in Automake.  Although RUNTESTFLAGS should normally
not be overridden (grep the doc for AM_RUNTESTFLAGS) I don't
expect a problem with that.  If there is one, it's certainly a
bug elsewhere.

 Mark> (b) Prevent users from setting the value in the environment.

Similar variables (ETAGSFLAGS, CTAGSFLAGS, and JAVACFLAGS) are
defined this way.  This has always puzzled me and I believe the
point is precisely to have environment independent builds, at
least I can't think of any other.  Maybe Tom can shed some light
on this, since he actually defined all of these variables
consistently: each time FOOFLAGS is defined empty and
AM_FOOFLAGS is used but not defined.

AFAIC, I'd rather spur the use of "make FOOFLAGS=value" or 
"make -e" because environment dependent builds are harder to 
debug when you have no clue they are environment dependent.  
I guess everybody has already been bitten by a hidden 
environment variable.

Still, I'm not a DejaGNU user, so maybe none of this makes sense
and RUNTESTFLAGS must be handled differently from other
variables.
-- 
Alexandre Duret-Lutz