grep-2.5 -- 'make check' failure and 'make install' problems

[Peter Breitenlohner]

Hi,

I just fetched and installed grep-2.5.
Unfortunately, like so many other recent GNU packages,
grep-2.5 has some configure/check/install problems.

In the last few weeks I have encountered these:

1       'make check'
                doesn't work outside the source tree
2       'make check'
                doesn't work at all
                (Your note
                "Please, do not be alarmed if some of the tests failed"
                is extremely unhelpul!!!)
3       'make DESTDIR=<some_where> install'
                (package building) doesn't work
4       'make install-strip'
                doesn't work
                (most of the time due to a bug in the by now senile
                version 2.13 of autoconf)
5       'make DESTDIR=<some_where> check'
                (as implied by
                'make DESTDIR=<some_where> all check install')
                doesn't work
6       'make install'
                doesn't work

Grep-2.5 exhibits (2), (3), and (6). Most of the problems are fixed by the
attached patch. In addition, almost all of the test/*.sh shell scripts were
lacking the execute permission required for a sucessful 'make check'. This
is somewhat strange since 'make dist' should have taken care of that (at
least I saw something of that sort in the toplevel Makefile)

Here some comments about the patch:

tests/bre.tests:

I think the original test is just plain wrong (has anyone done 'make check'
before posting the new version?)

src/Makefile.in:

This should (of course) actually go into src/Makefile.am, I was just too lazy
to run automake and rebuild src/Makefile.in (and I have recently encountered
problems in doing so due to automake-1.4/1.6 incompatibilities).

(a)     DESTDIR was missing

(b)     You must remove old files before creating sym-links.
        This is particularly important when the previous version 2.4.2 had
        three different binaries instead of one binary and two sym-links!

regards
Peter Breitenlohner <address@hidden>

grep-2.5-patch
Description: Text document