Re: Fw: bug in texi2dvi, and hack patch

[Eric Blake]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

[cross-posted to autoconf, thread starts at
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2005-01/msg00016.html]

According to Eli Zaretskii on 1/18/2005 1:18 PM:
>>Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 06:29:08 -0700
>>From: Eric Blake <address@hidden>
>>Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden
>>
>>Instead of using $COMSPEC for determining the path
>>separator, you should use autoconf's approach (look at any recent
>>configure script generated by autoconf 2.59 for this snippet):
>>
>>if test "${PATH_SEPARATOR+set}" != set; then
>>  echo "#! /bin/sh" >conf$$.sh
>>  echo  "exit 0"   >>conf$$.sh
>>  chmod +x conf$$.sh
>>  if (PATH="/nonexistent;."; conf$$.sh) >/dev/null 2>&1; then
>>    PATH_SEPARATOR=';'
>>  else
>>    PATH_SEPARATOR=:
>>  fi
>>  rm -f conf$$.sh
>>fi
> 
> 
> If this is what Autoconf 2.59 really does (i.e., no typos etc. in this
> snippet), then Autoconf 2.59 is broken, at least for DJGPP, because it
> will always produce PATH_SEPARATOR=:.  This is because it invalidates
> PATH, and therefore defeats the DJGPP magic that looks for sh.exe
> along PATH if /bin/sh.exe does not exist.  (And /bin/sh.exe does not
> exists on almost every DJGPP installation.)

If this is true about DJGPP, then autoconf needs to revisit how
PATH_SEPARATOR is calculated.

> 
> Instead of such complicated jumps through the hoops, I'd suggest to
> keep the original test, but augment it with something specific to
> Cygwin.  Is there some environment variable, like OSTYPE or something,
> whose value shows that a Cygwin Bash is being run?  If there is such a
> variable, we could look at it in addition to COMSPEC.

There is always the uname utility, although I'm not sure it is the best
approach:
case `uname` in
  CYGWIN*) path_sep=: ;;
esac

>>Additionally, according to autoconf, `test -x' is not portable.
> 
> But needed for DJGPP/MinGW, where "test -f tex" does not find tex.exe,
> but "test -x tex" does.
> 
> So if this is changed to not use "test -x", the non-Posix systems will
> still need "test -x" (which is okay for those systems, since the
> ported Bash supports "test -x").

CVS Autoconf also tackled this issue, see
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf-patches/2004-12/msg00057.html

> 
> 
>>Your best bet may be to make texi2dvi a generated file from
>>texi2dvi.in, and let autoconf determine @PATH_SEPARATOR@ and even
>>the location of tex up front at configure time
> 
> 
> Again, doing the latter (i.e. determining the location of TeX at
> configure time) might be okay on Posix systems, but not on
> DJGPP/MinGW, since it is _very_ customary on those systems to download
> pre-compiled binaries, and thus configure-time settings are usually
> invalid.  (Actually, I think Cygwin users will not like your
> suggestion either, since AFAIK they, too, tend to download binaries.)
> 

But on cygwin downloads, they tend to be to a normalized path (ie the
cygwin installation point is normalized to /, all pre-compiled cygwin
binaries are put in /bin, and /usr/bin is mounted to /bin), so even if the
tex executable is downloaded to something as outrageous as 'q:\my
hairy\windows\path\cygwin\bin', the precompiled binary still sees it at
/usr/bin because of the PATH normalization going on.

- --
Life is short - so eat dessert first!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (Cygwin)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFB7lRJ84KuGfSFAYARApVkAJ9V5cXc+tq9E/ePBMeclrXYFBXHBQCgwuoF
j2/HYvYy48SqMN+4v6MaA5c=
=BK5I
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----