Hi Christoph, While updating the openSuse package to Automake 1.18, I stumbled across the attached patch. I got permission from the author to upstream it. Are you interested?
Thanks, but no. This was fixed in 1.17, by replacing the use of = in the help text and doc with spaces. Since test-driver never supported = signs for parsing, no one could ever have used it that way. Main ChangeLog entry below for reference. Also, not that it matters given the above, but the patch uses various sh(ell) unportabilities. Closing ... --thanks, karl. 2024-05-21 Mark Wooding doc: test-driver option args are separate words. For https://bugs.gnu.org/70638. As now mentioned in the manual, the description of the test-driver command-line interface has been wrong since 2011 when it was first added. The manual, and the driver usage messages themselves, have consistently shown option arguments joined to the option name with `=' characters, while the implementation of Automake has always provided option arguments in the following argument word, and the provided test drivers only accepted option arguments in the following argument word. Because Automake has never used the `=' syntax, there can't possibly be a working driver which actually follows the specification as written, so, despite the fierce language of the manual, we agreed that changing the specification was the right approach. The `test-driver' program's usage message has already been fixed (#22445), but the full extent of the problem wasn't noticed at that time. * doc/automake.texi (Command-line arguments for test drivers): Fix the table of options to show arguments passed as separate words; add footnote explaining this rather sorry situation. * doc/automake.texi (Use TAP with the Automake test harness): Remove `=' from documentation of `--diagnostic-string', because that was never acceptable either. * lib/tap-driver.sh: Fix usage message. * contrib/tap-driver.pl: Change usage message to match the defined protocol. (This implementation parses options using Perl's `Getopt::Long' module, so it accepts the `=' syntax as specified, but this program isn't actually used.)