Subject: Re: libtool 20030216: problem recognizing import libraries
From: Charles Wilson <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Cc: Teun Burgers <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2003 15:35:03 -0500
Newsgroups: gmane.os.cygwin

Igor Pechtchanski wrote:

> FYI, in my case it made the error more apparent (something like
> "/usr/bin/tail: no such file or directory"), but no less cryptic.
> The temporary fix is to rename /bin/HEAD to /bin/HEAD.pl (along with the
> other two scripts, just for consistency).  If it ever gets accepted into
> libwww, it could be a permanent fix as well.

For reasons outlined earlier, I doubt that would ever happen.  But even 
if it does, we'll still need to deal with systems that have the "old" 
HEAD script installed for the next decade, probably(*).  There are 
places still using perl5.005, not to mention perl4...

--Chuck

(*) Actually, this could probably work; any *cygwin* system can 
reasonably be expected to have a recent version of libwww.  "legacy" 
systems that keep the old libwww will typically be unix/linux/etc -- but 
those platforms don't suffer from a confusion between HEAD and head.

However, it was still bad practice for me to write code that directly 
calls a platform executable, without using the autoconf machinery to set 
a variable.  I screwed up, so I oughta fix it -- even if perl/libwww 
removes the conflicting file that highlighted my mistake.

I probably should add a test for 'file' as well -- but that usage in 
libtool predates me (e.g. everybody else is already calling 'file' 
directly, so I should be able to do so in win32_libid() as well; if it 
breaks in win32_libid(), it'll break in hundreds of other places in 
libtool...)  So I'll stick with head, for now...

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