Re: options and automake version

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Jason Kraftcheck wrote on Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 05:25:10PM CEST:
> I would like to enable some of the options new to version 1.11 of automake
> (color-tests, silent-rules, & parallel-tests.)  However, many of the people
> I work with are still using version 1.10.  I had hoped that 1.10 would just
> ignore unrecognized options, as the options I wanted to add are not
> essential to the build process.  Unfortunately, automake fails when it
> encounters unrecognized options.  Is there some trick I could use to
> conditionally add the options if they are supported?

Unfortunately, we don't have a macro yet to ask automake whether some
version is supported; that is on the TODO list; see here for some
discussion:
<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.sysutils.automake.general/10933>

For features introduced with 1.11, you should be able to workaround like
this:

m4_ifdef([AM_SILENT_RULES],
  [AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([silent-rules parallel-tests color-test ...])],
  [AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([...])])

Cheers,
Ralf