Date: Thu, 10 Sep 1998 01:30:02 -0700 (PDT) From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: bin/6557: /bin/sh is broken Message-ID: <199809100830.BAA27356@freefall.freebsd.org>
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The following reply was made to PR bin/6557; it has been noted by GNATS. From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: freebsd-gnats-submit@freebsd.org, dima@best.net Cc: Martin Cracauer <cracauer@cons.org>, woods@zeus.leitch.com (Greg A. Woods) Subject: Re: bin/6557: /bin/sh is broken Date: Thu, 10 Sep 1998 04:33:30 -0400 So, what (if anything) was decided after all this discussion about IFS handling in /bin/sh? I'm wandering into this topic now because someone used autoconfig to setup a program they are working on, and they wanted me to try this out on "any OS's" I had. I noticed that the configure script got some syntax errors under freebsd, traced those down, and wrote a minimal script that showed the problem (of course I did this *before* checking the gnats database, thus wasting time that I could have easily avoided wasting...). If I understand the discussion in bin/6557 correctly, assorted standards imply that the script I wrote (based on what autoconf did for my friend) is *not* supposed to work. At the same time, the script I have does in fact work on NeXTSTEP 3.3, AIX 4.1, AIX 4.3, Solaris 2.5, Solaris 2.6, IRIX 6.2, IRIX 6.3, and whatever versions of linux this guy is running. It also works if I use bash under FreeBSD (I didn't check bash2...). So, either freebsd could change to work like every other /bin/sh I curently have access to, or all those /bin/sh's will change to follow these "standards" that everyone is quoting from. The first question would be: What is the probability that either one of these two things will happen? Is it greater than zero? This would probably be a much less important issue if it wasn't for autoconf. There are at least two other ways that autoconf could do it's checking which would work for freebsd's current /bin/sh and which would also be guareenteed to work on every operating system that their current strategy works on. What is the probability that we could convince the autoconf guys to change the tactic some of their tests use? (I have no experience using autoconf itself, just the scripts that it generates). I realize we could fix autoconf for freebsd, but is there any way to fix it on freebsd such that we "auto correct" for programs which were autoconfig-ed on some other platform? (such as this tar file I picked up from my friend on his linux box). Note that I'm not pursuing the question of "what is the correct behavior of IFS in shells", I'm just at the level of the more pedestrian question of how to coexist gracefully with autoconf'ed programs. My friend took a real mess of code and cleaned it up to use autoconf, which was a very good thing. It'd be nice if the result worked correctly on freebsd without tripping into syntax errors. Admittedly, I'm not in a good mood about this at the moment, but I'm not upset with "freebsd" so much as "unix written standards", which are apparently totally disconnected from "unix reality". As odd as it sounds, I'd be much happier if this was just a bug in freebsd that no one had gotten around to fixing yet. --- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or drosih@rpi.edu Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-bugs" in the body of the message
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