Hi Paul, Some time ago, with regard to my bootstrap rewrite, you suggested that the hoop-jumping I do to find a backslash-friendly echo equivalent on the host machine was probably overkill nowadays, and that it would be cleaner to just use `printf '%s\n'` everywhere.
The bs_echo boilerplate in bootstrap is shared with libtoolize, libtool, bootstrap and others with my funclib.sh library, and that in turn was mostly copied from the as_echo guts of a recent Autoconf, with some additional gunk that libtool has been carrying around for several years to cope with some of the nasty delayed-evaluation of scriptlets containing backslashes stored in shell variables dance it does at runtime - for which a non-backslash mangling echo is essential. Now, while I'd like to go ahead and make this change, which would save me from a few $ECHO/$bs_echo related bug reports every year at least, this comment still worries me: # There are still modern systems that have problems with 'echo' mis- # handling backslashes, among others, so make sure $bs_echo is set to a # command that correctly interprets backslashes. # (this code from Autoconf 2.68) # Printing a long string crashes Solaris 7 /usr/bin/printf. bs_echo='\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\' bs_echo=$bs_echo$bs_echo$bs_echo$bs_echo$bs_echo bs_echo=$bs_echo$bs_echo$bs_echo$bs_echo$bs_echo$bs_echo And a little further down: # Prefer a ksh shell builtin over an external printf program on Solaris, # but without wasting forks for bash or zsh. My current thinking is that I'd happily move to a printf-everywhere simplification across the board, as long as Autoconf also committed to the same improvement. I'll provide the patches if there is a consensus to apply them. But, it looks like doing so effectively deprecates Solaris 7 support, which may be premature... Comments? Cheers, -- Gary V. Vaughan (gary AT gnu DOT org)
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