Re: [PATCH] Add shell-quasiquote.

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden
> From: Paul Eggert <address@hidden>
> Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2015 08:41:19 -0700
> 
> On 10/22/2015 08:03 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> >> I beg to differ: IMHO, on Unix-like systems, there's no point for
> >> >`shell-command' and friends to support anything but /bin/sh, which is
> >> >certainly a Bourne shell and hopefully reasonably POSIX compliant.
> > I see your point.  However, this is contrary to a very old and
> > documented behavior.  Would such a change be acceptable?
> >
> 
> I suppose it would be an incompatible change, but I think it'd be a good 
> idea.

Then maybe we should do this now.

> People writing Elisp code shouldn't have to worry about the syntax
> of the C shell, or of some MS-Windows shell.

The change I had in mind was one limited to Posix platforms.

Commands that should run on all supported platforms cannot assume a
Posix shell on all of them.  The issue at hand is unrelated to
MS-Windows, since $SHELL is not set there unless the user sets it, and
Emacs on MS-Windows overrides it (by pointing to cmdproxy) even if it
is set.  And since there are no good native ports of a Posix shell to
MS-Windows, we cannot ask our users to install such a shell as a
prerequisite for Emacs shell-command and its ilk.