Re: Backquotes in quotes in backquotes (Was: Success (mostly) with the testsuite)

[Akim Demaille]

>>>>> "Daniele" == Daniele Arena <address@hidden> writes:

Daniele> Ehm... Sorry, but now there's something I don't
Daniele> get. Really. Is it in any way possible that the tests give
Daniele> different results if run with different shells?...

Sure!  That would reveal bugs in Autotest.  But it should not show
anything related to Autoconf per se.

Daniele> I ran the same commands on the same sources (but 2 separate
Daniele> directories) to make check the package, but in one I used
Daniele> tcsh to issue the commands and in the other I used bash. And
Daniele> I have different results, i.e. different sets of failures.

Just don't use any C shell for any Auto* stuff.  And do yourself a
favor: don't use any C shell at all :)

Daniele> Up to now, I thought that the shell from which I run the
Daniele> commands had no importance whatsoever. Was I wrong?

It depends how you run the test suite.  I mean, it should use /bin/sh
in any case but if you

        tcsh ./testsuite

but if you `make check', or `./testsuite', it should be /bin/sh.

Daniele> If you need all the output files, tell me. I just didn't want
Daniele> to flood the list with them. I can also try other shells if
Daniele> you like:-}.

I don't think you really ran tcsh.  There are way too many differences
for it to proceed.  But after all, why not make sure it is not a C
shell?

How about this:

if (foo=foo; test "$foo" != foo) >/dev/null 2>&1; then
  AC_MSG_ERROR([your shell does not appear to be a Bourne shell])
fi