[Texmacs-dev] Re: #!/bin/bash in TeXmacs

[Joris van der Hoeven]

Hi Geert,

Thanks for considering to include TeXmacs in NetBSD.

On Wed, Nov 09, 2005 at 02:01:33PM +0100, Geert Hendrickx wrote:
> I use TeXmacs on NetBSD, and it works great, except a tiny issue with the
> plugins: most of them are #!/bin/bash scripts, but many non-Linux systems
> (*BSD, Solaris, ...) don't have /bin/bash.  However, the plugin scripts
> seem to work fine with a POSIX /bin/sh, too.  So we (NetBSD packagers)
> patched them to use #!/bin/sh.  You may want to do this in the TeXmacs
> sources too, since AFAIK on Linux systems, /bin/sh is a symlink to
> /bin/bash, so it won't break anything but will make it work on a larger
> variety of UNIX systems.  
>
> These are the files we patched: 
> 
> plugins/dratex/bin/tm_dratex
> plugins/eukleides/bin/tm_eukleides
> plugins/gnuplot/bin/tm_gnuplot
> plugins/lisp/bin/tm_lisp
> plugins/lush/bin/tm_lush
> plugins/matlab/bin/tm_matlab
> plugins/maxima/bin/maxima_detect
> plugins/maxima/bin/tm_maxima
> plugins/mupad/bin/tm_mupad_help
> plugins/octave/bin/tm_octave
> plugins/reduce/bin/tm_reduce
> plugins/xypic/bin/tm_xypic

This issue is indeed a bit problematic, because some systems don't have
/bin/bash, while others don't use bash as the standard shell.
In the past, I changed from /bin/sh to /bin/bash because several
people asked me to do so. Now you ask me to go the other way around.
What would be a more reasonable solution?

Best wishes, Joris