Re: VCSWITNESS = fail ** 2

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

"Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com> writes:

> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>:
>> Actually, I take that back: the original code should work, and works
>> for me.
>> 
>> So let's please step back one notch: can you please tell what exactly
>> is wrong with the way vcswitness is computed and passed to the
>> sub-Make?
>
> What I know is this: 
>
> I was trying to modify that code to DTRT in both a Bazaar and .git repo, 
> using .git/HEAD as a witness in the latter case.  The way my modification 
> failed caused me to suspect that the original code hadn't been working.
>
> So I reverted to the trunk version and instrumented, by inserting an
> echo before the generated make command.  Lo and behold, vcswitness was
> empty.
>
> I looked again.  Had I doubled $ properly for the make context?  I had;
> vcswitness was really empty.  (But I was already pretty sure of that; if
> doubling $$ had been incorrect it would have expanded as somebody's 
> process number.)

More likely than not, you missed one \ somewhere, resulting in a
_different_ shell being called which then never heard of vcswitness.

> So I posted to the list and waited for somebody to point out the flaw
> in my reasoning.  Nobody did. Meanwhile, in my own test builds
> vcswitness continued to be spuriously empty.
>
> The rest you all know.  Eli took his own comic pratfall, momentarily
> breaking the build. And he's been around the track a few times
> himself.
>
> At present, I have no explanation for the observed differences in
> behavior more predictive than "phase of the moon".

Please read the previous two paragraphs together.  You ridicule Eli for
not managing to fix your breakage in the first try, and then state that
you yourself have no idea what caused it.

Now we may have clashing/incompatible personalities: that's to be
expected.  But please note that you are _not_ measuring yourself with
the same standards you apply to others.  If we had two Eric Raymonds
involved here, one would mercilessly mock the other one.

This is not a problem of the mailing list: it is a problem of yourself.

> Those three lines are, by demonstration, so prone to be misread that
> they tripped up Eli and me in two different ways and I still have no
> theory to account for why they were different.

And yet you spout things like "Eli took his own comic pratfall,
momentarily breaking the build".

It's not like Eli and I get along with each other.  But you are clearly
completely out of line here.

> That says "maintainence nightmare - should be scrapped and replaced"
> to me.

You did not offer any replacement or a suitable suggestion for
replacement.  Yes, your own comic pratfall suggests that it's not
trivial to understand.  But nobody claimed that.

-- 
David Kastrup