Re: [PATCH] gnulib-tool: avoid 'if ! ...' in conditional dependencies.

[Nick Bowler]

On 09/03/2021, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote: > On 3/9/21
6:29 PM, Nick Bowler wrote:
>> This syntax is not portable in practice, as discussed in the Autoconf
>> manual[1].
>
> This shouldn't be a issue in configure scripts, since they should
> arrange to use a good shell. If that isn't happening for some reason I'd
> rather fix the underlying problem than go through configure.ac and .m4
> files etc. looking for compatibility problems with old or nonstandard
> shells.

I agree this is not a serious practical problem.

However, I routinely use heirloom-sh to suss out shell portability
issues with multiple systems and noticed this when I added an additional
gnulib module to my project.  This tiny fix to gnulib-tool enables my test
builds to pass again.

I actually am not sure why this never came up before, looks like the errors
were always there but never caused real build problems with this shell.
Just coincidence I suppose.

Cheers,
  Nick