Re: PATH then SHELLS (Was: bison-1.29c 'configure' problems on Solaris 8)

[Akim Demaille]

>>>>> "Paul" == Paul Eggert <address@hidden> writes:

>> Still, I don't understand why we don't loop over shells and then on
>> PATH instead of the converse.

Paul> Because it is the wrong strategy if one wants to replace
Paul> "#!/bin/sh" with "address@hidden@" on Solaris 8.  If you loop on PATH
Paul> first, you may get SHELL="/usr/xpg4/bin/sh", or even
Paul> SHELL="/user/eggert/bin/sh".  Both of these solutions are
Paul> inferior to "/bin/bash", which is more likely to be present on
Paul> all hosts in the installation, and which is what the current
Paul> code produces.

Errr, I don't understand this paragraph, which seems to agree with
me.  I'm asking why we *don't* loop over shells (hence bash before
sh), and then over path.


Paul> If I recall correctly, I originally wrote the code to loop on
Paul> the shell first, and then went to the current solution when I
Paul> ran into problems like the above.

It still remains obscure to me :(


Paul> This is one area that we can't hope to fully automate on all
Paul> hosts, as each installer will have different opinions on what is
Paul> "nice" shell is.  The best that we can do is to come up with a
Paul> reasonable heuristic that works well enough in practice, with an
Paul> override mechanism for experts who know better.

Yep!