Re: Dependencies should include "realpath"

[Tomi Ollila <tomi.ollila@iki.fi>]

On Sat, Oct 17 2020, Ralph Seichter wrote:

> * David Bremner:
>
>> Do you have a suggested replacement? I guess some inline perl with "use
>> Cwd 'realpath'" would probably work, although I haven't tested it.
>
> At a quick glance, that particular section of "configure" is run by
> doc/conf.py to generate three lines of Python code and store the result
> as sphinx.config, correct? If so, my preferred choice would be to use
> Python to figure out the absolute path, e.g. like so:
>
>   rsti_dir = os.path.abspath('emacs')

Good suggestion, anyway, the simplest change would be just:

-    printf "rsti_dir = '%s'\n" $(realpath emacs)
+    printf "rsti_dir = '%s'\n" $(cd emacs && pwd -P)

> This shows the generated result, and I assume that emacs is a directory
> in the source tree? I also wonder if an absolute directory path is really
> required for the doc-build to work.

Absolute path is safer when doing out-of-tree builds

> The segment of conf.py which uses the generated config file does not
> look convincing to me anyway. Apparently the original author did not
> like it either, which is why the segment is labelled as "hacky". It
> should probably be overhauled, and not only because it uses the
> statement open(rsti_dir+'/'+file) which will potentially fail, depending
> on the build platform.

Sure, the doc/conf.py is somewhat hacky, but has done the work for couple
of years already :D (not that anyone who would like to make is better would
not be welcome to do so). Then, just for the record, I think 
open(rsti_dir+'/'+file) is fine, and I don't see it failing on any
imaginable system notmuch work (now?;) -- I am even personally changing
some os.path.join(...) commands to use that concatenation instead, just
to reduce complexity and line count elsewhere...

Tomi

>
> -Ralph