On 09/03/2021, Paul Eggert <egg...@cs.ucla.edu> wrote: > On 3/9/21 6:29 PM, Nick Bowler wrote: >> This syntax is not portable in practice, as discussed in the Autoconf >> manual[1]. > > This shouldn't be a issue in configure scripts, since they should > arrange to use a good shell. If that isn't happening for some reason I'd > rather fix the underlying problem than go through configure.ac and .m4 > files etc. looking for compatibility problems with old or nonstandard > shells.
I agree this is not a serious practical problem. However, I routinely use heirloom-sh to suss out shell portability issues with multiple systems and noticed this when I added an additional gnulib module to my project. This tiny fix to gnulib-tool enables my test builds to pass again. I actually am not sure why this never came up before, looks like the errors were always there but never caused real build problems with this shell. Just coincidence I suppose. Cheers, Nick
