Re: [PATCH] bootstrap: support Automake-NG in $buildreq

[Stefano Lattarini]

Hi Eric, thanks for the quick feedback.

On 04/23/2012 05:51 PM, Eric Blake wrote:
> 
> What you have is worth committing now, but I wonder...
> 
> Why are we doing app=`echo "$app" | sed 's/-ng$//'` instead of
> app=${app%-ng}?
>
Because I thought ./bootstrap was expected to work also with "classical"
Bourne shells, not only with POSIX shell, but ...

> We already use $() elsewhere in bootstrap, and
> therefore we already require a decent POSIX shell (that is, Solaris
> /bin/sh can't run bootstrap, and all other shells that support $() tend
> to also support ${var%suffix}).
> 
... I surmise form your words this is not the case (yay!), so I will amend
my patch along your suggestion if nobody objects.

> There's probably a lot of cleanup we could do to bootstrap once we
> assume a decent shell; but we should probably also ensure that bootstrap
> can rerun itself under a decent shell rather than the current state of
> dying a horrible death on Solaris.
>
This is not high priority though IMHO, since 'bootstrap' is a developer-only
script, and developers are likely to have either bash or zsh installed, or
a better vendor shell (e.g., /usr/xpg4/bin/sh on Solaris) early in $PATH, so
it's a no-brainer for them to run bootstrap properly, i.e., using

  $ {bash|zsh|sh} bootstrap

What might be worthwhile is adding a check in bootstrap that will cause it
to abort early and with a clear error message if run under a non-POSIX
shell...

Regards,
  Stefano