[sr #110656] On AT&T UnixPC (3b1), parameter $3 gets overwritten (cleared) by call to subfunction.

[Alain Knaff]

Follow-up Comment #3, sr #110656 (project autoconf):

[comment #2 comment #2:]
> For this one I think we'll also suggest getting a working shell. The 3b1 is
a museum piece and it's not reasonable to expect Autoconf to make nontrivial
changes to run on a 35-year-old operating system.
> 
> > configure prints out "positional parameters were not saved." early on the
the configure process, so it seems to notice the problem, but then fails to
act on it
> 
> This is part of its attempt to find a working shell. If you provide one it
should work. If not, I expect it goes ahead anyway (and obviously fails).

Indeed, after getting bash (which proved to be not so easy, eventually I had
to set up a cross-compiler...), I got it to run  till the end, and it made the
needed Makefile and config.h all right.
Only snag was that it failed to write out confcache and Cache variables to
config.log due to out of memory condition.

Possibly this is due to creating too many subshells due to the following
construct:

 for ac_var in `(set) 2>&1 | sed -n
'\''s/^\([a-zA-Z_][a-zA-Z0-9_]*\)=.*/\1/p'\''`; do ...

Backquotes create a subshell, parenthesis around "set" create another, and
probably pipe another as well. This is not a problem on modern machines which
have enough memory and support copy-on-write. However, it was enough to push
the UnixPC over the limit.

Fortunately, as said, these errors didn't prevent creation of Makefile and
config.h

Another weird thing is that right after start it says:

as_fn_failure succeeded

However, this message doesn't seem to prevent the rest of the script to run.


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