Steve M. Robbins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > It is likely that the folks who wrote autoconf did not invent this > idiom for setting and re-setting $IFS. They probably borrowed the > idea from existing shell code, meaning that the "breakage", as you put > it, will be widespread indeed.
Please read the code before commenting: It says: IFS="${IFS= }"; ac_save_ifs="$IFS"; IFS=":" If you don't mind me postulating, the first command is actually trying to assign a default value to IFS if it isn't set. This is actually better than what Zack Weinberg was trying to do, except that it has an incorrect default value. > The autoconf folks try very hard to write portable code. They go to > ridiculous lengths to support every major flavour of OS, compiler, > make, and shell. Indeed, Zack's tests show that only the recent ash > behaves differently. So what? Broken code is broken code. -- Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 is out! ( http://www.debian.org/ ) Email: Herbert Xu ~{PmV>HI~} <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Home Page: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/ PGP Key: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/pubkey.txt