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Re: [Scsh-hackers] scsh 0.6.4 and staging directories

To: Michel Schinz <Michel.Schinz@epfl.ch>
Subject: Re: [Scsh-hackers] scsh 0.6.4 and staging directories
From: Martin Gasbichler <gasbichl@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>
Date: Tue Oct 7 04:38:05 2003
Cc: scsh-hackers@lists.sourceforge.net
List-id: Discussion among the implementors <scsh-hackers.lists.sourceforge.net>
Sender: scsh-hackers-admin@lists.sourceforge.net
Michel Schinz <Michel.Schinz@epfl.ch> writes:

> Hi all,
>
> As several of you know (I think) the current distribution of scsh
> 0.6.4 doesn't behave well when one tries to install scsh in a
> temporary (aka staging) directory and then move it to its final
> destination. To illustrate that, one can issue the following commands
> which try to install scsh in /tmp/staging first and then move it to
> /tmp/final, using the "standard" trick which passes a different
> prefix to "make install":
>
>   [lamppc3 ms]% tar xzf scsh-0.6.4.tar.gz
>   [lamppc3 ms]% cd scsh-0.6.4
>   [lamppc3 scsh-0.6.4]% ./configure --prefix /tmp/final
>   [lamppc3 scsh-0.6.4]% make
>   [lamppc3 scsh-0.6.4]% make install prefix=/tmp/staging
>   [lamppc3 scsh-0.6.4]% mv /tmp/staging /tmp/final
>   [lamppc3 scsh-0.6.4]% /tmp/final/bin/scsh
>   Welcome to scsh 0.6.4 (Olin Shivers)
>   Type ,? for help.
>   > ,open pp
>   Load structure pp (y/n)? y
>   [pp
>   Error: exception
>          cannot-open-channel
>          (open-channel "/tmp/staging/lib/scsh/big/pp.scm" 1)
>   1 pp>
>
> Apart from the problems related to these hardcoded paths in the scsh
> image, another minor problem is that the man page contains incorrect
> paths which point to the staging directory.
>
> This problem is known, there are bug reports (with patches) in the
> Debian bug-tracking system [1]

I think the patch posted there is bogus because it breaks running scsh
from the source directory.

> , and Andreas Voegele submitted a patch to support something similar
> recently. Andreas' patch has been incorporated in the CVS now, but
> after 0.6.4 was out. I recently got a bug report for the same thing
> from a Fink user.
>
> This problem is a bit annoying because it affects packages for Mac OS
> (my Fink package has this problem), the Debian package, and all users
> who use GNU stow (or a similar program) to install scsh 0.6.4. And it
> is even more annoying since sunterlib was released, since sunterlib
> uses pp.scm.
>
> As far as I'm concerned, I have a patch for Makefile.in so that the
> above sequence of commands work, and I could modify my Fink package to
> apply this patch before compiling. But it will only solve the problem
> for the Fink package, so it would be cleaner to do a new release of
> scsh to solve that issue. But maybe the people in charge of the
> distribution feel this is not required, I don't know.

I'm not sure I understand you correctly: Are you already happy with
the current version of the r0-6-stable branch in CVS?

> So, to summarise quickly this long mail: should we (scsh package
> maintainers) wait for a new release of scsh soon which solves that
> problem, or should we work around it using patches?

I did not plan to release 0.6.5 within the next weeks because the
number of fixes and new features seemed to small to justify a new
release. 

On the other hand 0.6.4 has been out for about five months now so we
could show some activity. One outstanding bug I see is Peter Wang's
fix for compiling regular expressions. Mike promised to take a look at
a little while ago, but Peter's fix looks pretty obvious so I might
just commit it. I would also like to make the scsh library path
configurable at compilation time. If there is demand for a new
release, I can prepare it within a week or so.


--
Martin


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