On Mon, Mar 23, 2020 at 3:48 PM Bob Friesenhahn <bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us> wrote: > On Mon, 23 Mar 2020, Zack Weinberg wrote: > > > > Given that Debian is _deliberately_ configuring dash without LINENO > > support in order to work around configure scripts containing bashisms, > > I think we should make changes in this area cautiously and with a lot > > of public notice. It's my personal opinion that we should push > > configure-script authors in the direction of not using bash > > extensions, maybe even at the expense of performance. > > In my experience, bash is so popular as a command-line shell (and > sometimes/often as a scripting shell) that configure-script authors do > not know any better. They are not aware that they are using > bash-specific syntax since they often do not read documentation and > just use what appears to work. ... > some configure scripts are for convenience rather than portability
I don't doubt you -- but I think Autoconf does not need to cater to those people. If you don't need portability, if you just want a build system that will work on a small number of platforms that you yourself care about, there's lots of options that are less hassle than Autotools -- I've had relatively good experiences with Meson, I've also heard good things about Bazel, and I had _bad_ experiences with CMake but lots of other people love it so maybe it's just me. In fact, if you just want to write _code_ that will work on a small number of platforms that you yourself care about, I would suggest not writing that code in C anymore. Autotools and C still have their niche, and that niche is code that _does_ need to be extremely cross platform. That means future development of Autoconf should prioritize the needs of developers working on that kind of code. And I think one of the things those developers want is to be informed as soon as possible when their configure script is not as portable as it could be; which means, among other things, avoiding running it with bash or zsh unless no other option is available. zw
