Re: Mopre fun with vcswitness

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

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

> David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>:
>> > VCSWITNESS: $(srcdir)/../.bzr/checkout/dirstate
>> >
>> > While this is nonempty, it's not going to work either.
>> 
>> I don't see that.
>
> I believe you.  Which just increases my distrust of this code.
>
> You and I and Eli are running in environments we think ought not to be
> significantly different (in-place builds) and yet we get at least two
> and possibly three different behaviors (Eli hasn't reported his
> exactly enough for me to be sure).

"I don't see that" does not mean that I see a particular behavior when
running the code (I did not do so), but it rather means that I don't
agree with your conclusion.

> To add to the fun, I think this is different behavior than I was
> previously seeing from putatively identical code.

Where "putatively" means what _you_ remember being identical.  I already
opined that I consider it most likely you forgot a \ in your added code,
leading to different shell instances defining and printing vcswitness.
Quite a common Makefile fallacy.  An ugly design decision in my opinion,
but then it's been around for more than 30 years I think, so it's not
really likely to change.

> There's got to be some hidden state we're all missing.

Because you cannot reproduce what you think you saw before?  That's a
mystery nobody but yourself has a chance of addressing.

-- 
David Kastrup