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

[Daniele Arena]

On 30 Nov 2000, Akim Demaille wrote:

> 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.

OK, I give up. I reran all the tests with plain Bourne shell, and I
obtained Yet Another Different Set of failed checks.

If you really want, I can send you the tests with sh, bash and tcsh . But
maybe privately, not to spam the list.


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

Well, I was "born" with C Shell, so it will be hard... But from now on,
I'll use plain sh for autoconf testing.


> 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.

I run everything with "make check". BTW, I always have to run it twice
(with any shell); at the first time it says 

[...]
Making check in tests
gmake[1]: Entering directory
`/spool/daniele/downloads/cvs/orange-sh/autoconf/tests'
gmake  check-local
gmake[2]: Entering directory
`/spool/daniele/downloads/cvs/orange-sh/autoconf/tests'
cd . && ./mktests.sh ../acgeneral.m4   ../acspecific.m4
../acfunctions.m4 ../aclang.m4 ../acheaders.m4
egrep: syntax error
./mktests.sh: failed.  To proceed run make check.
gmake[2]: *** [syntax.at] Error 1
[...]


> 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

Hey come on, I know which shell I run...:) The file I sent you some mails
ago was produced by bash, and not tcsh.

Cheers,

Daniele.