830092 - js-1.8.5 install doe NOT create symbolic links

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core :: JavaScript Engine, defect)

Description

[Miles Fidelman]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:18.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/18.0 SeaMonkey/2.15
Build ID: 20130106004215

Steps to reproduce:

Just installed js185-1.0.0 onto Debian stable (Squeeze) following the directions at

from thesource at ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/js/js185-1.0.0.tar.gz

following the directions at 
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/SpiderMonkey/Build_Documentation




Actual results:

The README file states that "A symbolic link will be provided linking libmoz185.js.so to this library, along with libmoz185.js.so.1.0 when building the install target."

No link is created.  (note: this causes no end of trouble when building CouchDB on Debian - had to figure out what was going on, then make the link manually)



Expected results:

What the README says:
"A symbolic link will be provided linking libmoz185.js.so to this library, along with libmoz185.js.so.1.0 when building the install target."

(might not hurt to include the build instructions in the README file or an INSTALL file, as it is, one has to traverse down into ../js/src/README.HTML - which is simply a file saying ' see the documentation at http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/SpiderMonkey.  at least put this in the top level README which only points to the release notes but not the INSTALL instructions)

Comment 1

[Miles Fidelman]

Maybe not a serious bug as to functionality, but a really serious problem to folks who are linking to spidermonkey from other code, or installing code that links to spidermonkey (e.g., CouchDB).  

Since there's a simple workaround (create the link manually), an update to the README file and documentation web page would probably save at least a few people a LOT of wasted effort tracking down a dependency problem.  Making the information easy to spot would also help.