Unit tests of internal functions

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

--On Tuesday, December 29, 2009 11:18:44 AM -0500 Greg Hudson 
<ghudson at MIT.EDU> wrote:

> * (This is pretty far off topic, but since it came up:) I don't think we
> would get much out of using automake.  I am more interested in systems
> such as CMake or SCons which would help us unify our Unix and Windows
> build systems, but I'm not sure if either of them would turn out to be a
> great idea.  I also don't see us putting the resources into a build
> system migration at this time; we would benefit more from migrating our
> test suite or version control system.

I like packages that work correctly when I build in a separate object 
directory without write access to the source.

I like packages that correctly handle DESTDIR.

Using automake makes it much easier to get those two things right, so I 
tend to be happier with packages that use it.  However, I agree with Greg; 
converting an existing build system that works to automake generally does 
not get you much, unless the existing system was _really_ unmaintainable.

-- Jeff