Re: Problem with symlinks and VPATH Builds

[Mark D. Roth]

On Thu Aug 01 07:20 2002 -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> > > So it appears to me that the "proper" fix is to try "cd -P DIR" first,
> > > and to fall back on plain "cd DIR" if that doesn't work.
> > 
> > Sounds good.  Please see the attached patch.
> 
> On second thought, I don't think this is wise.  There is at least one
> other instance of "cd $foo && pwd" in Autoconf and the Autoconf manual
> talks about this idiom so that we can expect to see it in user code
> too.  Even if we work around these two instances of the problem, other
> instances will remain.
> 
> The underlying problem here is that $ac_top_srcdir is bogus, because
> "cd $ac_top_srcdir" and "ls $ac_top_srcdir" refer to different
> directories in POSIX 1003.1-2001 shells.  How about if we merely
> detect this problem and ask the invoker of "configure" to fix it?
> We should also document the problem, of course.

I agree that we ought to document this problem so that user macros are
updated to deal with it.  However, that doesn't prevent us from fixing
autoconf to do the right thing.  Making the invoker of configure deal
with it would be very inconvenient and wouldn't really gain us
anything.


On Thu Aug 01 13:46 2002 -0400, Eric Siegerman wrote:
> Hmmm, time for a CANONICALIZE_PATHNAME macro?  Bonus: it could be
> made to work with pathnames other than directories.

This is a really good idea.  Adding this macro would kill two birds
with one stone: it would provide a way for user macros to handle the
problem, and it would also allow us to easily fix autoconf to do the
right thing.

-- 
Mark D. Roth <address@hidden>
http://www.feep.net/~roth/