[clisp-list] building CLISP on OpenBSD

[William H. N. <wil...@ai...>]

A long time ago I reported that I couldn't get CLISP to build on
OpenBSD. I've now figured out the problem.

The basic problem is that the "sh" builtin command "cd" sometimes
emits output, e.g.
  $ cd /tmp
  $ cd .
  $ cd ''
  /tmp
  $ 
which plays havoc with the idiom
  canonical_filename=`cd $foo; pwd`
used by the CLISP build scripts to find canonical filenames. (The
basic problem was obscured by the way that the first failure caused by
the basic problem ends up interacting with some rather bizarre "sh"
syntax behavior.)

I've attached a diff against the clisp-2.27 sources to redirect output
from "cd" to "/dev/null". It let CLISP build and pass its tests on my
OpenBSD 2.9 system. I don't guarantee that I didn't make some obscure
mistake in one of the many places where the backquote/cd/pwd idiom is
used, and it'd might be better to find some way to wrap up that idiom
in a subroutine anyway. But at least it shows the way to go for CLISP
maintainers who don't happen to have OpenBSD machines handy for
testing.:-|

-- 
William Harold Newman <wil...@ai...>
"Furious activity is no substitute for understanding." -- H. H. Williams
PGP key fingerprint 85 CE 1C BA 79 8D 51 8C  B9 25 FB EE E0 C3 E5 7C