Touching the PATH

[Akim Demaille]

I fyou look at the current tarball of GNU M4, located here:

        http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~akim/download/m4-1.4q.tar.gz  or .bz2

you'll see that make distcheck fails, while make check passes.
distcheck fails in a simple way, corresponding to this:

~/src/m4/m4-1.4q/=build/tests % echo 'esyscmd(m4 --version)' | PATH=`pwd`:$PATH 
m4

m4: error while loading shared libraries: m4.so.0: cannot open shared object 
file: No such file or directory

What's wrong?

What is wrong is that the PATH is not the one I passed:

~/src/m4/m4-1.4q/=build/tests % echo 'esyscmd(echo $PATH)' | PATH=`pwd`:$PATH 
m4                                                   
/home/akim/src/m4/m4-1.4q/=build/src/.libs:/home/akim/src/m4/m4-1.4q/=build/tests:/home/akim/bin:/home/akim/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/games

and therefore, it is not the m4 I wanted to run that is run:

~/src/m4/m4-1.4q/=build/tests % echo 'esyscmd(which m4)' | PATH=`pwd`:$PATH m4
/home/akim/src/m4/m4-1.4q/=build/src/.libs/m4          

Which apparently, didn't get the variables it wanted.

This is because of the following lines in ltmain,.sh:

          $echo >> $output "\
      # Export the path to the program.
      PATH=\"\$progdir:\$PATH\"
      export PATH

      exec \$program \${1+\"address@hidden"}


Why not running directly the program?  Well, because:

1997-01-28  Gordon Matzigkeit  <address@hidden>

        * ltmain.sh.in (link): Export the PATH variable in order to find
        the program, rather than giving a full path.  This helps give the
        program a less confusing value for argv[0].


but this is no longer relevant!!!  Just look at the poor name reported
by the program:

remo% ./m4 --help | sed 1q
Usage: lt-m4 [OPTION]... [FILE]...

the name is already broken by the fact that lt- is prepended.

So, because playing with PATH (and with any user var actually) is a
bad idea, I vote for the replacement of the code above by:

          $echo >> $output "\
      exec \$progdir/\$program \${1+\"address@hidden"}

Comments?