Installation issues about form HOT 4 CLOSED

Thank you for your reporting.

About the -Wunused-result warning, in principle the return-value should be checked, although what we can do when ftruncate failed is just printing some error message and terminating the program. Usually it works without error checkings unless some severe IO problems occur (e.g., disk error).

For the make check problem, I confirmed the same problem occurs also in my environment (openSUSE 13.1). More investigation is needed.

About the manualdate.tex problem, I would use LC_TIME=C date to ensure the output format is always like 22 May 2014, because -I option is not in the POSIX specification, http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/date.html. (But -d is also not in the POSIX....)

The last one is easy to answer. You should use Format O3 (capital O), not Format 03 (zero). If you use the latter, it means the line size in the output should be 3, so FORM complained 3 is too small and corrected it to 39.

from form.

Thanks a lot for the quick answer. That clears things up for me. I leave it to you, when you want to close the issue.

from form.

I found the make check problem is caused by automake >= 1.13. The following is a somewhat technical detail and you may jump to the last paragraph.

In automake >= 1.13, the default behaviour of the test suite was changed in an incompatible way (a parallel test harness). I prefer a serial test harness (because of its output behaviour and there is only one test program form.rb to be executed, i.e., a parallel test harness doesn't lead any parallelization in our test suite), so a simple workaround is adding serial-tests option in AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE. It resolves the problem in automake >= 1.13, but in automake < 1.12 serial-tests is not available and causes another error.

To use serial-tests with keeping backwards compatibility, I tried m4_ifndef([AM_PROG_INSTALL], [serial-tests]) and m4_ifdef([AM_EXTRA_RECURSIVE_TARGETS], [serial-tests]) found in https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake/2013-01/msg00052.html and http://www.memoryhole.net/kyle/2014/01/automake_113s_parallel_harness.html, respectively, but both seem not to work in my environment.

An alternative way is check automake --version by m4_esyscmd as https://www.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2013-February/msg00102.html, but I don't like to do that because the command name of automake can differ from automake. (And I can't find a way to get the automake command name in the m4-layer.)

As a consequence, a workaround for now is adding serial-tests option in AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE in configure.ac manually if you use automake >= 1.13:

AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([foreign 1.7 dist-bzip2 serial-tests])

(By the way, my commit 3d69423 is a fix of make check about other stuff.)

from form.

All the problems here were resolved at least for typical environments, so I close the issue.

from form.