Re: [Quilt-dev] problems with quilt mail

[Jean Delvare]

On Tuesday 14 February 2012 12:56:42 am Andreas Gruenbacher wrote:
> On Mon, 2012-02-13 at 22:34 +0100, Jean Delvare wrote:
> > Hi Andreas,
> >
> > On Saturday 11 February 2012 10:42:59 pm Andreas Gruenbacher wrote:
> > > I've pushed a few fixed to the fixes-0.51 branch:
> >
> > I see that you request bash version 3.2 now. This seems a little
> > harsh to me. I have a system still running Slackware 12.0 (still
> > supported), it comes with bash 3.1.17 and quilt is running fine on
> > it as far as I can say. What are your specific concerns?
> 
> I don't really mind as long as I can use the pipefail feature.  Feel
> free to reinstate compatibility with versions of bash that have that
>  and don't have the quoting bug (the check which I removed from
>  configure.ac when requiring 3.2).

My point is that your commit is wrong to start with. You claim that 
"bash 3.1 is known to be broken already", but the bug in question was 
only affecting the early 3.1 versions, 3.1.11 and later are OK, and 
every user of the 3.1 branch would have upgraded to a good version by 
now.

We aren't going to request bash version N+1 as soon as a bug is found in 
version N. As long as the bug is fixed at some point in bash branch N, 
that version shouldn't be excluded.

WRT pipefail, instead of requiring a specific bash version, it would be 
better to add a test to the configure script. I doubt that every version 
before 3.2.0 has it wrong and every version since 3.2.0 has it right. As 
far as I know the feature itself was added in bash 3.0.0 so I would hope 
that at least some versions between 3.0.0 and 3.1.17 have it properly 
implemented.

In general I am not in favor of dropping bash tests from the configure. 
Regressions can happen and these tests are a great opportunity to catch 
these.

Also, when you need a specific bash feature for only one optional quilt 
command (and I consider mail to be optional, many quilt users never need 
it) then it may make sense to simply exclude the command in question 
from the build if bash is too old, rather than failing the build 
altogether. I know this means some work on the build infrastructure, but 
this should be considered, as being able to run quilt on old systems is 
an important feature IMHO.

-- 
Jean Delvare
Suse L3