Using endgame tablebases with scid on debian

With the debian installation of scid, I tried [Options], [Tablebase Directory], and I always received the error:

Scid: Tablebase results
No tablebases were found.

Why? The endgame tablebases feature is disabled by the package maintainer for legal and/or ethical reasons.

This I discovered from an ancient usenet posting.
Okay, that's fine. I've rebuilt it myself. And I'll post the instructions here.

0) sudo apt-get remove scid
This prevents our freshly rebuilt scid from loading the broken /usr/bin/tkscid.
1) wget http://internap.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/scid/scid-3.6.1.tar.gz
Or just use your favorite browser to download.
2) tar -xvzf scid-3.6.1.tar.gz
3) cd scid-3.6.1
4) ./configure
6) make
7) sudo make install

Great, now tablebases are fully functional in scid.

But why didn't I get some kind of warning that the feature was disabled?

Because there's a typo in the scid source file scid-3.6.1/tcl/menus.tcl, line 631:

$m add command -label OptionsTable -command setTableBaseDir
set helpMessage($m,14) OptionsTable
if {![sc_info tb]} { $m entryconfigure 13 -state disabled }

In the previous line, the 13 should be 14. If you look at the debian scid, you'll see [Options], [Load Spellcheck File] is disabled. Instead, the [Tablebase Directory] option should be greyed out.

Please forward this info to whomever has access to the CVS.