Re: [Quilt-dev] CVS test suite fixes

[Jean Delvare]

Hi John,

> Also, I would appreciate some assistance with one problem I found with
> the previous local-quilt.diff submitted to this list.  After
> compat/sendmail is created as a symlink to /usr/sbin/sendmail, if
> Makefile is modified, the symbolic link is always regenerated because
> make uses the date of the linked file(/usr/sbin/sendmail) rather than
> the symlink(compat/sendmail).  This can be avoided by using the
> --check-symlink-times option.
> 
> I was not able to find any way that this option can be enabled from
> within the distributed Makefile, so the need to use this additional
> option would probably come up on the list a bit.  To avoid that, the
> updated patch generates a virtual symlink as a shell script, with a
> restriction that only 9 parameters will be passed through.  I think I
> may be able to remove that restriction by using: set -o noglob;
> /bin/whatever $@, but I have yet to test that thoroughly.
> 
> Can this be improved on?

If your wrapper script is a bash script, you can use "$@" (note the
quotes) to pass all the parameters through. This method shouldn't have
any parameter count limit (except for the maximum size of the command
line itself, of course).

That being said, this approach promises to be less efficient than a
symbolic link, as you will have to fire up bash one additional time
each time you start the given program. We'd better avoid that, if
possible.

-- 
Jean Delvare