Re: 'whence' question and others

[Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca>]

On 11/10/2014 12:20 AM, Bart Schaefer wrote:

> If you build from the parent directory, configure will be (re)run when 
> necessary by "make". Also in that case, the documentation will be 
> rebuilt when the .yo files are changed. 


Is there a decent doc for 'configure', what it does, how it works? I see 
the msg. scroll by,
and they are mostly about what is and isn't available.  One can easily 
understand that
there'd be a check for essential stuff, but it seems do do much more 
than that. What makes
a reconfigure necessary?

> What exactly do you mean by "function help"? The documentation for the 
> library functions? On most linux systems "info libc" will probably work

Tx.  Once I got the proper name of the lib from that the rest was easy.

> If you configure with --enable-zsh-debug then a function dputs() is 
> available which writes messages to the file named by the 
> $ZSH_DEBUG_LOG parameter. It's kind of a stripped-down printf() which 
> accepts only a few %-formats: %s = string, %d = int, %L = long, %c = 
> char (including multibyte), %e = error number [for strerror()], and %l 
> which is for non-nul-terminated strings and accepts two arguments, the 
> char* and the number of bytes to print. If you want to leave some kind 
> of tracing on during normal use, I would recommend using dputs() and 
> setting $ZSH_DEBUG_LOG. There are also a set of DPUTS() macros which 
> are sort of like assert() wrappers for dputs(). Something akin to the 
> above paragraph ought to be in zsh-development-guide somewhere. 

Good, some nice robust methods.