Troubleshooting some weirdness....

[evert vorster]

Hi there.

I have come across the weirdest error I have seen in a while, and
somehow bash or one of it's dependencies seem to be at the bottom of
it.

Here is the background:
I run Sorcerer Linux, a sources based distrobution.
All software installed on my box have been built from source with gcc,
and are the latest version, optimized with -march=core2 -O2 -pipe

Around a month or two ago, something changed on my system, and the
following sources failed to run through the ./configure script
included in their tarballs:
ncurses, swig, gstreamer, gst-plugins-base.

Upon inspection of the errors produced, it looks like bash started to
treat backticks differently than to what it had done before.
I suspected an environment setting change, and spent quite some time
changing all sorts of settings, all with little result.

Finally, I returned my system to it's original configuration, and just
replaced /bin/bash with a binary that was not compiled on my system,
but of the same version.

>From there on, the ./configure scripts I had trouble with started to
work normally again.

Naturally, this behaviour has me very interested, and I thought you
guys might be interested too.

Are there any tests I can perform that will narrow down the culprit or
further define what, exactly, has gone wrong?

I am quite happy to provide compile logs, version numbers of software
and run tests on my system to get to the bottom of this.

So, have you seen anything like this before, and if not, would you
like to give me some pointers about which direction to proceed in to
narrow down this errant behaviour of /bin/bash compiled on my system?

-Evert-
--
You are the gardener in your own life. Be careful what you sow...