[Bug: 21.5-b27] startup.el "borks" filepath?

[robert delius royar]

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 (11:35 +0900 UTC) Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Thanks for the report, and thank you for localizing it this far!  I
> need to clean up some stuff before I can properly try to reproduce it
> (tonight, I think), but the following information may help me.
> They're all just clarifications, not intended to point to an actual
> suspect.

I have found one show stopper that I could fix.  Adding the line
datarootdir=@datarootdir@ 
to
Makefile.in.in
lib-src/Makefile.in.in
lib-src/config.values.in
leads to a dumped xemacs that will run in place.  Configure
warned that these files seemed to ignore datarootdir

Issuing a make install fails on the third iteration of the loadup code. 
However, doing
make prefix=/Users/royar/usr/local \
  datarootdir=/Users/royar/usr/local/lib \
  datadir=/Users/royar/usr/local/lib install
installs a working XEmacs in ~/usr/local/bin and all the other parts in 
~/usr/local/lib, which is where they used to reside.

I am suspecting based on files and directories created when prefix is 
not set, that there is a new hierachy for installation recommended, and 
that somewhere in the code that creates the hierarchy there needs to be 
a check for prefix being set by user preference.  Because the install 
can get through a few iterations before failing, I suspect the last 
failure occurs because having prefix set makes it so that some file (or 
path) startup.el needs is not being seen.  I would look for a variable 
that should be referencing a user-set preference but is not--probably 
datadir or datarootdir.

> robert delius royar writes:
>
> > This bug showed up yesterday with the 20061116 CVS.  Compilation
> > occurs as normal, and temacs links.  However, when temacs first
> > loads with the command ./temacs -nd -no-packages -batch -l
> > /Users/royar/src/xemacs/src/../lisp/update-elc.el it aborts after
> > loading startup.el saying that it cannot find the file listed in
> > preloaded-file-list immediately following startup.el.
>
> The only recent change to startup.el is Malcolm's change to the
> startup screen code.  I suppose this could result in a change in
> XEmacs's default-directory, but it's strange that it wouldn't affect
> everybody.
>
> When was the previous build (if you have that as your working XEmacs,
> it should be available in M-X emacs-version and M-X describe-installation)?
> Do you have an XEmacs installed in /Users/royar/usr/local already?
> Does that directory already exist and have reasonable permissions?
> Have you tried with any other explicit --prefix settings?

The last build that was successful (without the change to the 
config/make files) was 20061114; however, there is a caveat: I first 
discovered the error rebuilding 20061114 when I wanted to try the edit 
to gnuclient.c you had posted answering another user's query (because I 
also wanted to use local sockets).  First, the install failed, and then 
I could not get the initial dump to work.  It took a few days to to see 
that the make install had created a few new directories in ~/usr/local. 
I suspect that the code (seeing that ~/usr/local/xemacs and 
~/usr/local/share existed) may have been searching them, but I have no 
evidence other than the effect to support this.

> > uname -a: Darwin grendel.frinabulax.org 8.8.0
>
> This is a Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" system, right?

Yes, it is 10.4.8 with the latest revisions to gcc.  The processor is a 
g5, and I do not use the universal SDKs, so I am not creating a 
multi-architecture executable.

By the way, it is probably not an error, but I have been seeing the 
following in my configure since the mailing list reactivated:

checking for compiler version information... powerpc-apple-darwin8-gcc-4.0.1 (GCC) 4.0.1 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 5367)
checking for standard C library version information...
checking for runtime libraries flag... sed: conftest.c: No such file or directory
sed: conftest.c: No such file or directory
sed: conftest.c: No such file or directory
NONE

> Thanks!
>
> Steve
>
>

-- 
Dr. Robert Delius Royar                   Associate Professor of English
Morehead State University                             Morehead, Kentucky
                                    Making meaning one message at a time.