Colons in parent's parent directory name causes build failure

[Zach Etienne]

Steps to reproduce (on Ubuntu 22.04, and I’ve reproduced this on Rocky Linux 8 as well).

Go to /tmp/ , create a directory named ETK_builds/Riemann:test:sed
Go to this directory: cd /tmp/ETK_builds/Riemann:test:sed . Download the latest Toolkit release (Riemann), following the official instructions:

curl -kLO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gridaphobe/CRL/ET_2022_05/GetComponents
chmod a+x GetComponents
./GetComponents --parallel https://bitbucket.org/einsteintoolkit/manifest/raw/ET_2022_05/einsteintoolkit.th

Copy the config scripts attached to this ticket to Cactus and go into Cactus. Upon running the make blah-config, you will get errors of the form

creating make.config.defn
sed: can't read /tmp/ETK_builds/Riemann: No such file or directory
sed: can't read /tmp/ETK_builds/Riemann:test:sed/Cactus/lib/make/test: No such file or directory
sed: can't read /tmp/ETK_builds/Riemann:test:sed/Cactus/lib/make/sed/Cactus/lib/make/make.config.defn.in: No such file or directory

… and you will be unable to build the Toolkit.

[Zach Etienne]

I suppose I’m most confused by the fact that the make config scripts are using full paths and not relative paths. Seems a bit flaky…

[Roland Haas]

autoconf is the one using absolute paths. I tried getting rid of them once (for spaces on windows), see: https://bitbucket.org/cactuscode/cactus/branch/rhaas/spaces

So the absolute paths are not going away so easily. That colons also cause issues is new and something that may be fixable (the spaces are an issue b/c make really cannot handle spaces in paths, “just don’t use them” is what the official solution boils down to).