Re: Any issues that would hold up release of 4.6.1?

[Mojca M. <moj...@gm...>]

On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 8:48 PM, Ethan A Merritt wrote:
>
> === emacs ===
>> Mojca Miklavec <moj...@gm...>
>> Not a major showstopper, but I would be grateful if someone could take
>> a look at the attached patch for emacs (and apply before the release
>> it if possible). The problem is that setting
>>     EMACS=/path/to/some/Emacs ./configure
>> is later "reset" with
>>     EMACS=`basename $EMACS`
>> in lisp/configure[.in], so version checking and all further
>> emacs-related operation fail to work properly since they call whatever
>> emacs/xemacs comes first in PATH instead of the one requested by user.
>
> I am very reluctant to make changes to the configuration system for 4.6.1
> that have not previously been tested in the development tree.
> That said, I am willing to have a look at this if you can you clarify
> what the problem actually is.
>
> Which of these is happening?
> 1) you have an "emacs" in your path that is incapable of compiling the
>    three files gnuplot.elc gnuplot-gui.elc gnuplot-eldoc.elc?
> 2) The version check to see if emacs is older than version 20.3 fails?
> 3) The *.elc files are compiled properly but installed in the wrong
>    site-lisp directory?
>
> As to (2) is any of this still needed?  The README says that the
> info-look.xxx files are a work-around for incompatibilities in ancient
> versions of emacs and Xemacs.  Can we just get rid of these files and
> get rid of that section of the Makefile?

I'm very grateful for removing that ancient portion of code from
lisp/configure.in, however the
     EMACS=`basename $EMACS`
line is still causing problems (both in trunk and in branch-4-6-stable).

Can someone else please test if the following works or fails for you?

    # provided that /usr/bin/emacs is a valid emacs binary
    ln -s /usr/bin/emacs /tmp/myemacs
    which myemacs
        # should not return anything
    cd /path/to/gnuplot
    EMACS=/tmp/myemacs ./configure
    make

For me it fails with:

./doc2gih ../../original/docs/gnuplot.doc gnuplot.gih
Making all in lisp
myemacs -batch -q -no-site-file -l ../../original/lisp/dot.el -f
batch-byte-compile gnuplot.el
make[2]: myemacs: No such file or directory
make[2]: *** [gnuplot.elc] Error 1
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make: *** [all] Error 2

And the following trivial patch solves the issue:

--- a/lisp/configure.in
+++ b/lisp/configure.in
@@ -13,8 +13,6 @@ AC_SET_MAKE
 AC_PROG_INSTALL
 AM_PATH_LISPDIR

-EMACS=`basename $EMACS`
-
 AC_CHECK_PROGS(DVIPS, dvips, no)
 AC_CHECK_PROGS(LATEX, latex latex2e, no)
 AC_PATH_PROG(MAKEINFO, makeinfo, no)

Is this only a problem on my machine or are others able to reproduce
the problem?

(The line used to be used until recently to be able to compare if
$EMACS equals to "emacs" or "xemacs", but those lines have gone, so I
don't see any good reason to keep that line any more.)

Thank you very much,
    Mojca

PS: I know that calling emacs "myemacs" might seems like an imaginary
problem, but it is a real problem on Mac OS X where (the desired)
EMACS binary is often not in PATH and it is called "Emacs", with
uppercase, and it either fails completely or uses the wrong binary.
This is just a simple minimal example which should demonstrate the
problem on systems other than Mac.