Re: Problem with symlinks and VPATH Builds

[Mark D. Roth]

On Fri Jul 19 12:08 2002 -0400, Eric Siegerman wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 19, 2002 at 07:31:24AM -0500, Mark D. Roth wrote:
> > The only thing I can think of is
> > to use "`/bin/pwd`" instead of "." for $ac_dir, but I'm not sure if
> > that would break anything else.
> 
> That's probably best -- as long as one can depend on there to be
> a /bin/pwd (as opposed to the builtin)...

I've just verified that /bin/pwd exists on the following OSs:

  AIX 4.3
  HP-UX 11
  IRIX 6.5
  OpenBSD 3.1
  RedHat Linux 7.2
  Solaris 8

Does anyone know of any OSs where /bin/pwd does NOT exist?


> The only other thing I can think of depends on knowing how to
> keep the bogus info from propagating from the user's shell into
> the process that's running the script.  In ksh and bash, it's via
> the magic environment variable PWD, but how dependable is that?

I've never seen a shell that doesn't use $PWD, but resetting it
globally might have some bad side-effects as well.  For example, the
user would probably want $abs_builddir to be set using the symlink
path, not the real path.

The best behavior would probably be to use "." for abs_builddir and
abs_top_builddir, but "`/bin/pwd`" for abs_srcdir and abs_top_srcdir.
If no one has any other ideas, I'll throw together a patch that
implements this.

-- 
Mark D. Roth <address@hidden>
http://www.feep.net/~roth/