errors with edit...and problems with bug_report

[John W. Eaton]

On  6-Jan-2008, Vercelli wrote:

| 
| ----- Original Message ----- 
| From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo.che.wisc.edu>
| To: <ororo at email.it>
| Cc: <bug-octave at octave.org>
| Sent: Friday, January 04, 2008 7:36 PM
| Subject: errors with edit...and problems with bug_report
| 
| 
| > On 30-Dec-2007, ororo at email.it wrote:
| >
| > | I've just updated to octave 3.0.0, *windows version*.
| > |
| > | (i) try "edit <filename>" (without .m). It gets an error (it tries to 
| > access
| > | filename.m instead of filename.m)
| >
| > I think you mean filename/.m, but anyway, yes, there are two places in
| > edit.m where strcat should be used instead of fullfile.  There is also
| > one other small bug in the edit function that was fixed after the 3.0
| > release.  Please try the patch below.
| >
| 
| it works, thanks.
| 
| 
| > | (ii) try "bug_report". After a long list of warnings (gnu_...: this 
| > function
| > | is obsolete and will be removed ...)
| > | windows tries to open a file, but windows (and me) don't know what kind 
| > of
| > | file it is. Probably this is obvious for unix users.
| >
| > Yes, the bug_report script is a Unix shell script.  It won't work on
| > Windows systems.
| >
| > jwe
| >
| 
| ok thanks. So, may you consider a release for windows? maybe this patch?

I can't accept the patch as it is because the octave_bug_win function
you sent has the values for things like CFLAGS hardcoded.  These
values are not fixed, but determined when Octave is configured and
built.  So as a minimum, these values need to come from
octave_config_info, but using that (and even using an Octave function
to report a bug) is problematic because the bug may be that Octave
can't run at all.  That's why there is a separate shell script to use
for reporting bugs On Unixy systems.  So I think we also need a
separate program on Windows systems.  And it would probably be best if
we had just one script/program that works for both systems (at least
sharing the code for setting up the bug report message).

OTOH, maybe we should just switch from mail-based bug reporting to a
web-accessible bug database with a form for entering bug reports and
have the bug_report function simply point people to the web page.  In
that case, the configure script could create a simple text file
containing build info that we could ask people to upload so we would
get the basic system information in the report.  If you'd like to
follow up on this topic, please move the discussion to the maintainers
list.

Thanks,

jwe