Re: [Openexr-devel] [Patch] Bashism in bootstrap scripts

[David Aguilar]

On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 10:44 PM, Piotr Stanczyk <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi Andreas,
>
> Thanks for the patches. I had a quick look at them and noticed that the '==' 
> operator has been replaced by '=' one.  Could you provide a little more 
> information as to the rationale behind this.

That is standard POSIX shell. "==" is actually a non-portable
operator, and some exotic shells will not understand it.

It's typical to see it used like this:

if test "$variable" = "value"
then
    # they are equal
fi

I did not read the patch, but if it's doing:

if [ "$variable" = "value" ]
then
    # ...
fi

Then I'd probably rewrite it to use the 'test' expression, but that's
because I'm very accustomed to the git/kernel style.

There's a whole list of various shell guidelines that are used on the
git project:

http://repo.or.cz/w/git.git/blob/HEAD:/Documentation/CodingGuidelines#l30

Portability is the reason.  git runs on all sorts of exotic alpha,
solaris, aix, etc. unixes (where #!/bin/sh is seldom bash) so the
portability concerns are very high.
-- 
David