bug#20186: Failure to create directory during info-building phase of "make distcheck"

[James Youngman]

Peter,

Thank you for your suggestion.    Though it didn't work immediately,
it did help to solve the problem.  Switching to $(LN_S) wasn't as
simple as I had hoped since I had included the dblocation.texi file in
the distribution, and "make dist" will invoke tar with the -h option
and dereference the symbolic link.   I didn't conclusively prove that
this made my problem persist, but certainly removing dblocation.texi
from the source distribution seemed to resolve the problem.  Though it
may mean that it will now be necessary for users to have makeinfo when
building and installing even if they didn't modify any of the Texinfo
sources.

In case you're interested, I attach the patch I ended up using.

Thanks for your help, everybody.
James.

On Wed, Mar 25, 2015 at 12:47 PM, Peter Breitenlohner <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Mar 2015, James Youngman wrote:
>
>> The timestamps look OK to me:
>>
>> ...
>>
>> Perhaps the cause is this rule, though:
>>
>> dblocation.texi: ../locate/dblocation.texi
>>        cp ../locate/dblocation.texi $@
>>
>> This will clearly update the mtime of dblocation.texi.
>
>
> Hi James,
>
> indeed.  You could use the modified rule
>         dblocation.texi: ../locate/dblocation.texi
>                 $(LN_S) ../locate/dblocation.texi $@
> where $(LN_S) is 'ln -s' on systems with working symlinks or otherwise one
> of 'ln' or 'cp'.  I assume your Makefile.in already contains
>         LN_S = @LN_S@
> otherwise you should add
>         AC_PROG_LN_S
> to your configure.ac.
>
> I assume 'make distcheck' will never run on systems without working symlinks
> so this should be OK.
>
> Regards
> Peter



-- 
--
This email is intended solely for the use of its addressee, sender,
and any readers of a mailing list archive in which it happens to
appear.   If you have received this email in error, please say or type
three times, "I believe in the utility of email disclaimers," and then
reply to the author correcting any spellings (and, optionally, any
incorrect spellings), accompanying these with humorous jests about the
author's parentage.   If you are not the addressee, you are
nevertheless permitted to both copy and forward this email since
without such permissions email systems are unable to transmit email to
anybody, intended recipient or not.  To those still reading by this
point, the author would like to apologise for being unable to maintain
a consistent level of humour throughout this disclaimer.  Contents may
settle during transit.  Do not feed the animals.

0001-Don-t-include-dblocation.texi-from-original-spot-sym.patch
Description: Text Data