rpl_canonicalize_file_name blues (while building octave)

[Thorsten Meyer]

Hi,

I am trying to build octave from the mercurial sources on a red hat 4 machine
with all the needed gnu tools and libraries compiled manually (I have no root
access...). So probably not everything is set up as it should be.

Anyway, till a couple of days ago, I could build octave cleanly (last successful
build was with 4d433bd2d4dc).

But now with the sources freshly updated from mercurial and the gnulib sources
also updated, the test suite fails,
because the function canonicalize_file_name needed by fntests.m does no longer
exist.

greping the sources I find that in libgnu/stdlib.h this definition is active 
now:
#if 1
# if 1
#  define canonicalize_file_name rpl_canonicalize_file_name

and syscalls.df contains this:
syscalls.df: XDEFUN_INTERNAL (rpl_canonicalize_file_name, args, , "-*- texinfo
address@hidden {Built-in Function} address@hidden, @var{status}, @var{msg}]}
canonicalize_file_name (@var{name})\nReturn the canonical name of file
@address@hidden deftypefn")

Also, the octave function canonicalize_file_name is not really gone: it has been
renamed to rpl_canonicalize_file_name and also seems to be functional (under its
new name).

So apparently, gnulib (or one of those autotools) thinks it needs to replace the
canonicalize_file_name function. Also the actual syscall seems to work. However,
the macro defined in stdlib.h seems to also affect the definition of the
corresponding octave function. Can this last somehow be avoided?

regards

Thorsten