Re: [PATCH] gnulib-tool: avoid 'if ! ...' in conditional dependencies.

[Nick Bowler]

On 2021-03-09, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
> On 3/9/21 6:45 PM, Nick Bowler wrote:
>> I routinely use heirloom-sh to suss out shell portability
>
> Does your project also have a problem on Solaris 10 because its /bin/sh
> also doesn't grok "if !"?

No idea.  I do not presently have the ability to test on Solaris 10.

However, what I do know is that testing with heirloom-sh successfully
identifies shell portability issues that exist on other (non-Solaris)
systems, where configure _will_ pick a shell that has some of the same
bugs as heirloom-sh, even if those shells don't happen to have this
specific shell bug.

For a very recent example, I have found that heirloom-sh appears to
share a bug with (some?) HP-UX 11 /bin/sh versions in its handling of
IFS='\'.  I am not aware of any other free shells that have this
particular bug, so I still think there is value in testing this way.

I imagine that heirloom-sh has some bug compatibility with the other
shells that exist on Solaris too.

> If so, how/why does that happen? ./configure is supposed to re-exec
> with a working shell, and this works for me when I run GNU Emacs's
> ./configure (which has a lot of "if !"s in it) on Solaris 10.
>
> If not, and if this is a problem only with the way you're using
> heirloom-sh to check portability, I wouldn't worry about it.

But I do worry about it.  The fix is simple; why not fix it?

Cheers,
  Nick