"Joel E. Denny" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Coreutils maintainers, > > It appears that Bison's bootstrap script is occasionally sync'ed against > Coreutils'. Paul Hilfinger, one of the Bison developers, recently made > the discovery quoted below, which I figure might also be relevant to > Coreutils. > > On Fri, 4 Apr 2008, Joel E. Denny wrote: > >> On Wed, 26 Mar 2008, Paul Hilfinger wrote: >> >> > The bootstrap file is headed >> > >> > #! /bin/sh >> > >> > However, it contains lines such as >> > >> > if ! "$SHA1SUM" -c --status "$cksum_file" < "$new_po" > /dev/null; >> > then >> > >> > and >> > >> > if ! test -d "$dst_dir"; then >> > >> > In a standard Solaris 10 installation, /bin/sh does not recognize the >> > '!' command. I had to fix this by changing the shell used by >> > bootstrap to /bin/bash. >> >> Thanks for the report. I don't know whether Bison should switch to >> /bin/bash or just weed out Bash-specific code. > > I just checked the Coreutils git repository, and it appears that similar > constructs are still present in its latest bootstrap version. I don't > know whether there are other Bash-specific constructs present. > > It appears that Coreutils, like Bison, requires repository users to > install Autotools, Gettext, etc, so it's probably not too much to ask them > to install Bash as well. However, it's not clear to me if we should > assume Bash can then be found at /bin/bash. What do you think?
Hi Joel, Thanks for forwarding that. My first reflex was to "fix" bootstrap not to use that construct, but there are too many occurrences, and that's a slippery slope. Besides, it's easy to work around. I'll probably change the instructions in README-hacking to mention that you may have to run "bash ./bootstrap" rather than $ ./bootstrap if your system's /bin/sh is substandard. Plus, maybe be a test to detect the broken shell and to warn you that you need to invoke the script differently. An alternative is to encumber bootstrap with shell-selection code and make it re-exec itself using a sufficiently functional shell. But that too may fail, so I don't see the point. _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils