Gentlemen: Thanks for rEFInd, it looks like liberation from the GRUB monster. I had a few issues installing it, if there's interest I'd be happy to go into it in depth.
"then it performs discard_until ('\n'); which is a simple function that zaps everything until the newline." Perhaps it is in the shell's favor that this way of parsing is surely the simplest. As you show, it's not exactly complicated! I sure appreciate your 'get it done' attitude, thanks, it makes reporting these things worth the trouble. So often the devs of various projects are more interested in the latest wiz-bang feature than in tidying up little bugs.
Well the fact remains that all the shells I've tried do it the same way as zsh and bash. Shouldn't it work as the shell actually is?
zsh 5.8 on Debian Stretch.
"The instructions was written by me. What exactly you doing? Without details we cannot help" Don't take this personally Alexander. It happens all the time that experts have trouble putting themselves in the mind of the beginner. You can't unlearn how to ride a bike, can you? What I did was copy and paste to command line the various blocks of commands shown. There was no indication of failure, no messages. Just no result. If you guys want, we could walk thru it in real time and probably figure it...
I went right through all the steps. There was no indicator of failure, just that my stellarium remained 0.15. I don't know where it went wrong. If you can suggest some "Ok, now you should see ..." sorts of diagnostics I'd walk thru it with you. This is only if you're interested of course. The AppImage is working fine. If you want a more polished build instruction I'm your test subject, otherwise I'm ok.
Yeah, that's the problem -- how can the expert relate to the beginner? Thing is, I don't know where it goes wrong, I just don't end up with any executable. I might be executing commands in the wrong directories or looking for things in the wrong places.
All I can say Gzotti is that it didn't work for me and I've built many projects from source over the years. There is something taken for granted in the doc that I need to know but don't know. Maybe something about the directories. You understand it so well that you take things for granted. This happens when you are an expert, it takes a guy like me to tell you what's lacking.