[petsc-dev] make ./configure not a symlink

[Lisandro Dalcin]

On 1 October 2010 22:05, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
>
> On Oct 1, 2010, at 6:48 PM, Lisandro Dalcin wrote:
>
>> Barry, could we make ./configure a proper file, using
>> execfile("config/configure.py") (actually, I'll make it a bit more
>> robust than that).  The reason is that symlinks sometimes cause
>> trouble, some versions of pip fail to install PETSc because of the
>> tarball containing a symlink. I've already had a report of such
>> failures.
>
>   Stupid PIP!
>

Well, I think it is not actually a pip problem, but something deep
inside the tarfile module in Python stdlib. Fortunately, very recent
pip versions seems to somewhat ignore or workaround the error. Anyway,
symlinks are definitely not portable. On Windows, ./configure is
basically broken, if you hg clone the repo, ./configure is actually a
text file with a single line saying "config/configure.py", i.e.
totally useless. Stupid HG! ;-)

>   I tried not using a link before and always had trouble passing all the arguments with any shell escape stuff they have into the inner python script.  So if it is 100% robust I have no problem changing it, but can you make it completely robust?
>

Can you show and example of what could be problematic? As I'm thinking
about using execfile, the inner script will see basically the same
sys.argv as the outer one, I fail to see how this could break.


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Lisandro Dalcin
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