Re: zsh fails the Autoconf test suite on Solaris 8

[Akim Demaille]

>>>>> "Paul" == Paul Eggert <address@hidden> writes:

>> From: Akim Demaille <address@hidden> Date: 19 Mar 2002 16:52:24
>> +0100

>> Actually, I'd be happy to see zsh promoted to a higher rank too,

Paul> It turns out that Solaris 8 zsh fails the Autoconf test suite,
Paul> even though Solaris 8 ksh passes it.  It fails badly, too: it
Paul> goes into an infinite looop, apparently.  I'll try to get to the
Paul> bottom of this if I have the time.  But this results suggests
Paul> that we shouldn't promote zsh right now.

This is a very well known issue, which was fixed is more recent
version of Zsh.  As a matter of fact, it is not an infloop, rather,
it's a very bad memory management that cause these disastrous
performances.

It has been fixed since.

I must say that I don't know what sign we could us to distinguish a
good zsh from a bad one.  It is the huge case structure of Autotest
which is responsible (or was it the huge `for'?  I don't remember
exactly) for this behavior.  It doesn't appear with Autoconf.  In
other words, Zsh is sane for configure, but probably not for
testsuite.

I'm not asking for making the distinction though.