Unit tests of internal functions

[Russ Allbery]

Jeffrey Hutzelman <jhutz at cmu.edu> writes:

> 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.

While I'm not arguing that anyone rush off and do this for MIT Kerberos,
having done this conversion for a bunch of packages now, what it does do
for you is that, after you're through, your build system code is 50% the
size it was originally or smaller and generally much more straightforward.

I'm not sure if that qualifies as much, but I've found it less tedious
from that point forward to add new source files, new targets, new
installed libraries, and so forth.  It's also easier to share code between
projects, although that's not as much of an issue here.

Note that when I do this conversion, I also convert to a non-recursive
build system and make other simplifications, so it's not entirely due to
Automake and Libtool.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>