name clash between (generated) `conftest.py` and this in m4 macros

[dimpase]

@jhpalmieri - thanks for digging this up. It's a name clash between (generated) conftest.py used in checking Sage's Python, and conftest.py introduced by this PR, and used by pytest. It's probably a standard name for pytest, so we'd need to rename conftest.py in the macros used by ./configure. I'll try to fix this. @tobiasdiez

Originally posted by @dimpase in #39206 (comment)

[tobiasdiez]

Sorry, I was not aware that configure writes files in the root directory. contest.py is indeed the standard pytest name, so shouldnt be used by configure

[dimpase]

I've checked that in ./configure one has

rm -f configure*

in a lot of places; these rm come from standard autoconf macros and it's unrealistic to fix them.

So what we can do is to use a shell analog of Python atexit facility to rename conftest.py to something safe, and then rename it back at ./configure shell exit.

Or perhaps tell pytest to look for conftest.py somewhere else, but I don't know how.

[dimpase]

Here is the answer I got on the autoconf mailing list:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf/2025-01/msg00013.html

tl;dr; no luck fixing it and preserving the way we do things now. They suggest a split build - I'll try, but I'm not hopeful.

[dimpase]

No, of course, split build (running configure+make in a subdirectory) can't be done without (major?) changes of what we do now.

How about going with a wrapper? Say, we have a script called Configure which makes a copy of configure.py, calls configure passing all the parameters, and finally restores configure.py ?

[tobiasdiez]

Is conftest actually a standard configure script? I thought it was a sage-specific one and it should be relatively straightforward to rename it here

sage/m4/sage_check_python_for_venv.m4

Line 107 in 5188024

dnl Write conftest.py and conftest.c

[dimpase]

I've checked that in ./configure one has

rm -f conftest*

in a lot of places. E.g. files called conftest.c etc are used by standard autoconf macros to test properties of the C compiler.

[dimpase]

autoconf (and GNU libtool!) practically owns conftest* namespace. we can't fix this by modifying our config files, hence a workaround