On Tue, 14 Jun 2011 22:55:18 -0700
Matt Welland <estifo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I thought that from an end user perspective all that is needed with autoconf
> is sh.
Not quite true. The problem is that, while every system has a /bin/sh,
different systems use different shells for that: most (but not all)
GNU/Linux systems use bash, the various BSD's use either things
derived from the original v7 sh, OSX switched from a BSD sh to bash at
some point, on SysV-based systems you can find Bourne shell, ksh or
pdksh variants, just to name the obvious ones. You can't even write
for a hypothetical "posix shell" because /bin/sh isn't posix compliant
on many systems. Which explains the (possibly apocryphal) Bourne
quote: "It's easier to write a shell than a portable shell script."
The result is that the autotools config script searches (or searched -
I haven't looked into it in a year or so) the system and $PATH for the
"best" shell to use. This means whether or not the script actually
works properly depends on which shell it finds (if the "best" shell
has a bug that some test trips over), which means it can depend on
$PATH and which shells are installed on the system.
In practice, it works fairly well because most systems have bash
installed (if only because GNU/Linux developers tend to write
bash-specific shell scripts, so a lot of software has a run-time
dependency on it) where the config script will find it, and the
autotools tests generally work around the bugs in it.
<mike
--
Mike Meyer <m...@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/
Independent Software developer/SCM consultant, email for more information.
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