Re: [gentoo-dev] POSIX shell and "portable"

[Michael Haubenwallner]

On Sat, 2007-11-03 at 00:47 +0000, Roy Marples wrote:

As it seems too few people really accept your suggestion, I feel it's
time for me to chime in too, although I don't know what exactly POSIX-sh
standard defines.

> On Sat, 2007-11-03 at 01:19 +0100, Fabian Groffen wrote:
> > On 02-11-2007 17:35:08 +0000, Roy Marples wrote:
> > > I don't see them as inferior.
> > > I see them as more portable and less confusing.
> >
> > Please stop calling it "more portable".
>
> But is it more portable as then then works across more than one shell.
>
> >   The shell code you see in
> > configure can in a way be called "portable".  Your POSIX compliant stuff
> > isn't.
>
> Sure it is - it should work on a shell that claims POSIX compliance.
>
> >   In fact, by stating #!/bin/sh you actually make the code useless
> > on a number of platforms, where it would have been working fine if there
> > just were #!/bin/bash there.
>
> Then the issue is to fix their sh so it follows POSIX compliance.
> As soon as a dash, bb or FreeBSD sh issue is found where it deviates
> from POSIX but it works on bash a lot of people say "dash bug, therefore
> invalid

Agreed, but (speaking for alt/prefix):

Alt/prefix is designed to (mainly) work without superuser access on the
target machine, which may also be Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and the like.
/bin/sh on such a machine is not POSIX-shell, but old bourne-shell
(unfortunately with bugs often).
And it is _impossible_ to have sysadmins to get /bin/sh a POSIX-Shell
nor to have that bugs fixed.

But yes, on most machines there is /bin/ksh, which IMHO is POSIX
compliant (maybe also with non-fixable bugs).

Although I do not know yet for which _installed_ scripts it'd be really
useful to have them non-bash in alt/prefix, I appreciate the discussion.

To see benefits for alt/prefix too, it _might_ require that discussion
going from requiring /bin/sh being POSIX-sh towards being
bourne-shell...

>
> > It seems to me that you actually mean "more FreeBSD-able" or something,
> > which is a high price to pay for a relatively small part of Gentoo as a
> > whole.
>
> More embeddable.
> More BSDable.
> More Linuxable - bash isn't the only linux shell, there are plently of
> others.

More (generic) unix-able.

/haubi/
-- 
Michael Haubenwallner
Gentoo on a different level

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