Future versions of autoconf/automake will be auto-enabling their subdir-objects feature. This impacts Squid in a few ways, the largest being how we perform unit testing.
At present our unit tests link to objects in $(top_srcdir)/src/tests/ and sometimes from other src/foo/ directories. The current automake will build a .o file in the current working directory, but with subdir-objects the .o would be built in the src/tests/ etc directory and shared between any other units using the base .c file. This will naturally cause build failures when the source sub-directory has not yet been created by the build process. subdir-objects is not automatically creating paths. I am proposing that: 1) we reverse the decision to build any unit tests in src/ subdirectories. Returning to the original design of using top level test-suite/ directory to build and run them. This will ensure that all necessary .la objects and src/ directories are already existing before unit tests get built. We are already facing some problems from that plan. For example when unit tests for src/fs/ need to link against src/http/*.la we currently have to build them in src/Makefile.am after all src/*/ sub-directories have been recursed and built. Some possible compat/ unit tests are also blocked by lib/* not being built at the time. 2) the STUB .cc files are moved from src/tests/. With subdir-objects we can a) place them in the relevant src/foo/ directory, or b) place them in src/stubs/. With a rename from stub_foo.cc to foo.stub.cc so we can make use of a generic automate their build and dist operations from Common.am (in case of 2a) or src/stubs/Makefile.am (in case of 2b). If agreed this would take effect after 3.5 branching. Amos
