vc-sccs.el sends bad args to cmp(1) via vcdiff script

[Jim Marks <jmm5491@yahoo.com>]

This bug report will be sent to the Free Software Foundation,
not to your local site managers!
Please write in English, because the Emacs maintainers do not have
translators to read other languages for them.

Your bug report will be posted to the bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org mailing
list,
and to the gnu.emacs.bug news group.

In GNU Emacs 21.4.1 (sparc-sun-solaris2.8, X toolkit)
 of 2005-12-14 on pkg-build
configured using `configure  --prefix=/pkg/gnu
--x-includes=/usr/openwin/include:/usr/dt/include
--x-libraries=/usr/openwin/lib:/usr/dt/lib --with-x
--with-x-toolkit=athena --without-toolkit-scroll-bars --with-xpm
--with-tiff --with-jpeg --with-gif --with-png'
Important settings:
  value of $LC_ALL: C
  value of $LC_COLLATE: nil
  value of $LC_CTYPE: C
  value of $LC_MESSAGES: nil
  value of $LC_MONETARY: nil
  value of $LC_NUMERIC: nil
  value of $LC_TIME: nil
  value of $LANG: C
  locale-coding-system: nil
  default-enable-multibyte-characters: t

Please describe exactly what actions triggered the bug
and the precise symptoms of the bug:

This problem surfaces on Sun Solaris when trying to use
version control with SCCS as the backend.

The source file gnu/share/emacs/21.4/lisp/vc-sccs.el has the following
defun:

(defun vc-sccs-workfile-unchanged-p (file)
  "SCCS-specific implementation of vc-workfile-unchanged-p."
  (zerop (apply 'vc-do-command nil 1 "vcdiff" (vc-name file)
                (list "--brief" "-q"
                      (concat "-r" (vc-workfile-version file))))))

The important thing here is that the "--brief" option gets passed
to vcdiff as well as the "-r" option.

On my system, vcdiff is a helper script in

gnu/libexec/emacs/21.4/sparc-sun-solaris2.8/vcdiff

It contains this code:


                case $f in
                --brief)
                        DIFF=cmp;;

and, later, executes $DIFf.  This causes cmp to be invoked
with a "-r" option.  I can't find any Unix-clone on which
cmp(1) takes "-r".  This will always cause certain vc operations
to fail on systems where SCCS is the vc backend.


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com