[Dune] suggestion for testing

[Andreas Dedner]

Hi,
some of the recent changes to the build system
are quite fundamental and therefore
a) difficult to test
b) rather devastating for users not accustomed to
   the ''guts'' of the build system.
We were therefore discussing possibilities of
increasing the success rate of checkins through
testing patches on different installations of libtool,
g++ Version etc.
We have a quite complex nightly build for dune-fem
using tar balls from the svn head and testing with 
all kinds of
grids and similar things. It would not be very
difficult to add new changes to the repository, e..g,
the build system after checkout. This would only
require a patch. This can be easily done by
sending us a file "patchfile" generated using
  svn diff > patchfile
as an email.
So our suggestion would be: before a major change to the
build system is committed, the patch could be send to us
and we add it to our nightly build. The next day
we know if everything worked out and can either commit
the patch ourself our give an ok for the patch to be
commit. If something went wrong we can try to figure
out what the problem was and make a suggestion for
correcting the problem, which should at least then
work on our system and others can then try it out on
there installation.
Martin would be willing to perform this task on our side!
And before I forget:
1) we would all like to thank Christian for the huge
amount of work he is investing into the build systen;
we appreciate how difficult it is and also how
difficult these change are to test throughly.
2) if somebody else would also like to test a patch
he should just yell. All one has to do is
run the command
  patch -p0 < patchfile

Best regards
the Freiburg team.

PS: tonight we got the following message:
cd . && ./bin/dunecontrol --only=dune-common m4create
writing dependencies.m4
    for dune-common 1.2svn dune at dune-project.org
{ test ! -d dune-common-1.2svn || { find dune-common-1.2svn
-type d ! -perm -200 -exec chmod u+w {} ';' && rm -fr
dune-common-1.2svn; }; }
test -d dune-common-1.2svn || mkdir dune-common-1.2svn
cp: cannot stat `./dune-common.m4': No such file or
directory