[Bug-zile] Reintroduce -batch? (was: Missing dependency for zile.1.in Makefile target)

[Ulrich Mueller]

>>>>> On Wed, 8 Sep 2010, Reuben Thomas wrote:

>> In a nutshell: Configure scripts of some programs are testing for
>> the location of Emacs's lisp dir, typically using an expression
>> like this:
>> 
>>   $EMACS -batch -q -eval '(while load-path (princ (concat
>>   (car load-path) "\n")) (setq load-path (cdr load-path)))'
>> 
>> Now if on a user's system /usr/bin/emacs is symlinked to zile,
>> above test will hang: Zile will happily ignore all command line
>> options and interpret the last argument as a file name.

> There's an obvious fix here to Zile, which is to make it support
> -batch in some basic form (as it has done in the past). Then the
> sort of invocation you mention above will indeed quit with an error.
> Would that fix your problem?

I've tested with zile-2.2.61 which still supports the -batch option.
The problem doesn't occur for that version, i.e. the configure script
(tested with bash) will not hang, but only display an error message
and continue:

   checking for emacs... emacs   # actually, symlinked to zile-2.2.61
   checking where .elc files should go... emacs: Unknown option `-eval'
   ${datadir}/emacs/site-lisp

So yes, if -batch was recognised it would solve the problem. It would
even be sufficient if Zile just exited with an error if a -batch or
--batch option was encountered.

Ulrich