Re: improved mh-chart man page

[Paul Fox]

ken wrote:
 > >I vote to stay with backticks.  We've maintained (or at least tried to
 > >maintain) Bourne shell throughout the rest of nmh, and I think we
 > >should keep it that way.
 > 
 > Officially, $(...) is part of POSIX; it's not a Bash-ism.
 > 
 > https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3_chap02.html


And, in fact, it was part of the POSIX.2 standard of 1994, 27 years ago:
    https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009656399/toc.pdf  (p.36)

 > 
 > We USED to use $(...) in the test suite.  But that was dropped because
 > it turns out that /bin/sh on Solaris does not support that (at least, that
 > was my memory).  I am neutral about whether or not we should continue
 > to support ancient shells.

I suspect anyone still running Solaris has long ago figured out how
to deal with "modern" shell features creeping into their ecosystem.
But how old, exactly, does a Solaris system need to be to not be
running a POSIX compliant shell?

I'm fine with not relying on GNU-isms, and I think we should avoid
the cutting edge in general, but in this case, I think we can take
a step forward.  If we get complaints, I'll be happy to revert to
backticks.

paul
=----------------------
paul fox, pgf@foxharp.boston.ma.us (arlington, ma, where it's 55.0 degrees)