symlink problems with mac os

[Björn Raupach]

> On 22. Oct 2017, at 19:40, Per Bothner <per@bothner.com> wrote:
> 
> On 10/22/2017 06:04 AM, Björn Raupach wrote:
> 
>> There is a Homebrew port fof Kawa which avoids the problem by patching
>> bin/kawa before installing it:
>> https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/master/Formula/kawa.rb
>> Agreed. I would do a patch like this in MacPorts, too. Was just raising awareness of this minor issue if it was unnoticed before.
> 
> I've been vaguely aware of it.
> 
>> The reason for the readlink to handle the case that you install kawa
>> as a symlink for example /usr/local/bin/kawa -> /opt/kawa-3.0/bin/kawa .
>> I think that is useful to support - and it doesn't work without the -f.
> 
> On second though that use-case can be handled just as well with creating
> an executable file /usr/local/bin/kawa containing:
> 
> exec /opt/kawa-3.0/bin/kawa "$@“

Not sure about this. Probably wouldn’t help my case. What if I don’t install in /opt/kawa-3.0? 

> 
> However, when doing a source build, and then executing from the build
> directory (as the test-suite does) still has to traverse a symlink,
> as configure creates a symlink from kawa.sh to kawa.sh.in.
> 
>> The maven snippet above handles that case. I can link a link and still get maven to run. Would make it portable and doesn’t need any dependency.
> 
> It would slow start up a little bit.

I don’t think it matters much. Slow start is already caused by starting a JVM. Starting chicken scheme or mit scheme feels more snappier. But we are talking felt milliseconds here. Compared to other programs kawa already starts fast.

> 
>> Looking for patches? I have time to look at that and now I am curious enough to try and solve this. ;)
> 
> I think I want to leave kawa.sh.in as-is, but have configure
> create kawa instead of kawa.sh.  That way we don't need a symlink in the normal case.
> I'm trying this out now.

Alright. I will still try to copy the plain bash approach in your startup script. Just to see if I can get it to run.

Happy Sunday

> 
> -- 
> 	--Per Bothner
> per@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/