"John W. Eaton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > even Ultrix had another shell, /bin/sh5, if I remember correctly, > that did support shell functions, and it would not have been too > difficult for configure to attempt to find it
Recent versions of Autoconf generate "configure" scripts that do just that, which is partly why I'm not so worried about the shell-function issue even for Ultrix. This also may help to explain why new "configure" start up so slowly on older boxes -- you don't get this functionality for free, unfortunately. Do you recall whether /bin/sh5 was a standard part of Ultrix and was installed on every Ultrix machine? If /bin/sh5 was an option and might not be installed, then there still might be an issue here.