From bug-request at octave dot org Wed Jan 19 20:34:49 2005
Subject: Re: Bug#290470: octave2.1: Octave's bug_report needs emacs or $EDITOR
From: Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian dot org>
To: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
Cc: Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian dot org>, Rafael Laboissiere <rafael@debian.org>,         bug@octave.org, Thomas Weber <weber@num.uni-sb.de>,         290470@bugs.debian.org
Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 20:38:31 -0600

On Tue, Jan 18, 2005 at 10:20:13PM -0500, John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 18-Jan-2005, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian dot org> wrote:
> 
> | I don't really know either, or I would have suggested it. We, as you know,
> | try to get by without environment variables. A Debian-only fix therefore
> | would be to talk to /usr/bin/sensible-editor, which is guaranteed to be
> | present. But that doesn't help in the general case for Octave.
> | 
> | It may not be worth going overboard here. You could do some autoconf magic
> | to check for emacs, xemacs, vi and remember the choice.  Or do that with
> | shell when the above is executed.
> 
> That would be better, since the binary may be running on a system
> different from the one where configure was run.
> 
> | In either event, I think it would be fair
> | to abort with a message "no editor found, tempfile in /tmp/$foo left for
> | manual continuation" or some such.
> 
> I think we already do something like this:
> 
>   devzero:260> EDITOR=foobar octave-bug
>   /usr/bin/octave-bug: line 226: foobar: command not found
>   problems with edit -- no bug report submitted
>   saving message in /home/jwe/dead-octave-bug-1

Right -- /usr/bin/R uses similar tricks to use env. vars when present, or or
default when not. It's a nice shell programming feature.

> OK, I just checked the bashbug script (which I used as the starting
> point for octave-bug way back when) and it now uses
> 
>   if [ -z "$DEFEDITOR" ] && [ -z "$EDITOR" ]; then
> 	  if [ -x /usr/bin/editor ]; then
> 		  DEFEDITOR=editor
> 	  elif [ -x /usr/local/bin/ce ]; then
> 		  DEFEDITOR=ce
> 	  elif [ -x /usr/local/bin/emacs ]; then
> 		  DEFEDITOR=emacs
> 	  elif [ -x /usr/contrib/bin/emacs ]; then
> 		  DEFEDITOR=emacs
> 	  elif [ -x /usr/bin/emacs ]; then
> 		  DEFEDITOR=emacs
> 	  elif [ -x /usr/bin/xemacs ]; then
> 		  DEFEDITOR=xemacs
> 	  elif [ -x /usr/contrib/bin/jove ]; then
> 		  DEFEDITOR=jove
> 	  elif [ -x /usr/local/bin/jove ]; then
> 		  DEFEDITOR=jove
> 	  elif [ -x /usr/bin/vi ]; then
> 		  DEFEDITOR=vi
> 	  else
> 		  echo "$0: No default editor found: attempting to use vi" >&2
> 		  DEFEDITOR=vi
> 	  fi
>   fi
> 
>   : ${EDITOR=$DEFEDITOR}
> 
> so I'll copy this method.

*Much* better. Good choice.

Dirk

-- 
Better to have an approximate answer to the right question than a precise 
answer to the wrong question.  --  John Tukey as quoted by John Chambers



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