Re: bug in configure?

[Pavel Roskin <proski gnu org>]

Hi, Marco!

> Sorry for being a newbie and for not being able to find what seems a
> very simple bug indeed. Now for the bug.

No need to apologize for being a newbie, as long as you don't touch CVS in 
the same time :-)

> Configure or make should be able to create a valid mc.sh & mc.csh but it
> seems it just copy mc.sh.in & mc.sch.in into mc.sh & mc.csh
> respectively. It seems it does not substitute the @suppbindir@ variable...

I think you are talking about the CVS version.  Then configure doesn't
create mc.sh and mc.csh at all - it's done by make.  The reason is because
bindir and suppbindir in configure require further expansion, and I'd
rather do it where it's normally done - in Makefile.

I see that you have committed some fixed to lib/Makefile.am.  I have two 
problems with it.  If the change is not trivial, please describe it in the 
ChangeLog.

You can find some of my commits without ChangeLog entries, but they were
made on the same day as the previous change and they were fixing problems
with the previous commit.  Those changes were already described by
ChangeLog.  I could add something like "oops, really make it work this
time", but I don't think it would be very useful, especially if the broken
version was on CVS for a few minutes and no snapshot was done from it.

I may reconsider this practice if it gives a bad example to other 
developers.

The other problem is that you admit being a "newbie" and still apply a 
patch without asking anybody.  I'd rather see some analysis why the patch 
was needed.

I did check the scripts, so it was working for me already.  I'm using Red
Hat 8.0 with GNU make 3.79.1, bash 2.05b and sed 3.02.  I don't know what
you were using that it didn't work for you, but it would be very useful if
we all knew that.

I would not rely on the fact that configure doesn't substitute
@suppbindir@ - this can easily break in the next version of Automake.  I
was consistently using two double quotes after the first @ to prevent
substitution.  One benefit of being consistent is that everything breaks
in the same time, like it did for you.  This means that the problem is
easier to notice and to fix.  Now @bindir@ is escaped by backslashes, and
@suppbindir@ is not escaped.

I'm very interested to know your versions on make, sed and shell.  I want
to see the rule for mc.sh in lib/Makefile you had before applying your
patch.  I also want to see the output when mc.sh was generated.

> And n.2 (just a style matter): I've noted some incoherency in the mc.1
> man file. Some keys are reported so (for example):

I think that using .TP and removing all punctuation from the entries would
be the most consistent approach.

Feel free to apply those changes if maint/doctest creates empty output
files (I really should improve it) and you are satisfied how the changed
parts look in the manual (e.g. F3 on mc.1) and in the help (F1).

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin