Re: How do a copy a file?

[Eric Siegerman]

On Fri, Apr 18, 2003 at 04:18:27AM +0100, Dr. David Kirkby wrote:
> Harlan Stenn wrote:
> > Have your script do a "pwd" so you can make sure you are in the directory
> > you think you are in.

That's what I'd have suggested next if Harlan hadn't beaten me to
it :-)

> /export/home/davek/sources/sources/atlc-4.3.1/=build/tests
> ../../examples/undefined_permittivities.bmp: No such file or directory
> cp: cannot access ../../examples/undefined_permittivities.bmp
> cannot open ../tmp/undefined_permittivities.bmp
> Zo =
> FAIL: 15a-undefined_permittivities.test

Am I guessing rightly that:
  - the root of your development tree, i.e.  $top_srcdir, is
    /export/home/davek/sources/sources?
  - examples/undefined_permittivities.bmp is supposed to be
    included in the distribution?

> It would appear it needs and extra ../ to find the file, as when I cd
> to where pwd says it is, the file is not where it thinks. 

I think the problem is not with the ..'s, but that there's
*supposed* to be a copy of this file under atlc-4.3.1 (where
../../examples/undefined_permittivities.bmp would find it), but
it's not getting put there.  Take a look at examples/Makefile.am;
I bet the .bmp file has been left out of your distribution
tarball.

It helps to understand what distcheck is doing under the hood.
The idea is to simulate how your distribution will behave once
someone else has downloaded it, and is trying to build and
install it with no access to your personal copy.  To that end,
distcheck:
  - calls "make dist" in your source tree to build a distribution
    tarball
  - untars the tarball into a temporary directory (in your case,
    the "atlc-4.3.1" subdirectory)
  - performs all the rest of its testing on the latter

Note in particular that, during most of the distcheck process,
"$top_srcdir" refers to the root of the temporary tree,
atlc-4.3.1, NOT to the normal root of your source tree.

> The top directory (where configure.ac resides) is in fact a symbolic
> link to somewhere else.

/export/home/davek/sources/sources, you mean?  I don't think that
would affect anything.

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        address@hidden
|  |  /
My Wine works.  However it crashes about half the time on startup.
Apparently their simulation of windoze API is getting too accurate.  :)
        - Kyle Sallee