RE: MSVC compiler support [patch 33]: Help

[John W. Eaton]

On 26-Oct-2006, address@hidden wrote:

| > I won't apply this patch unless I know why it is needed, and even
| > then, I think we should find some solution other than disabling help
| 
| Basically, the problem was I had was a crash due to the setvbuf problem.
| At that moment, I didn't setvbuf was crashing, so I disabled the code.
| If sed and makeinfo are available the code works OK, except that the
| sed for Windows (GnuWin32 package) uses double-quotes and not
| single-quote; hence the following patch:
| 
| Index: src/help.cc
| ===================================================================
| RCS file: /cvs/octave/src/help.cc,v
| retrieving revision 1.165
| diff -c -p -r1.165 help.cc
| *** src/help.cc 16 Aug 2006 06:52:19 -0000      1.165
| --- src/help.cc 26 Oct 2006 14:20:57 -0000
| *************** display_help_text (std::ostream& os, con
| *** 779,785 ****
| --- 779,789 ----
|   
|         std::ostringstream buf;
|   
| + #ifndef _MSC_VER
|         buf << \"sed -e 's/^[#%][#%]* *//' -e 's/^ *@/@/' | \"
| + #else
| +       buf << \"sed -e \\\"s/^[#%][#%]* *//\\\" -e \\\"s/^ *@/@/\\\" | \"
| + #endif
|           << \"\\\"\" << Vmakeinfo_program << \"\\\"\"
|           << \" -D \\\"VERSION \" << OCTAVE_VERSION << \"\\\"\"
|           << \" -D \\\"OCTAVEHOME \" << OCTAVE_PREFIX << \"\\\"\"

Are you sure it is not the command shell that is interpreting these?
In any case, " will work for Unix too, so I made this change
unconditionally.  But this just points out (again) how shell commands
will always be a source of bugs if we can't assume a POSIX shell
exists to run commands for us.

jwe