Re: Bash vs. sh

[Joel E. Denny]

Coreutils maintainers,

It appears that Bison's bootstrap script is occasionally sync'ed against 
Coreutils'.  Paul Hilfinger, one of the Bison developers, recently made 
the discovery quoted below, which I figure might also be relevant to 
Coreutils.

On Fri, 4 Apr 2008, Joel E. Denny wrote:

> On Wed, 26 Mar 2008, Paul Hilfinger wrote:
> 
> > The bootstrap file is headed
> > 
> >     #! /bin/sh
> > 
> > However, it contains lines such as 
> > 
> >      if ! "$SHA1SUM" -c --status "$cksum_file" < "$new_po" >  /dev/null; 
> > then
> > 
> > and 
> > 
> >      if ! test -d "$dst_dir"; then
> > 
> > In a standard Solaris 10 installation, /bin/sh does not recognize the
> > '!' command.  I had to fix this by changing the shell used by
> > bootstrap to /bin/bash.
> 
> Thanks for the report.  I don't know whether Bison should switch to 
> /bin/bash or just weed out Bash-specific code.

I just checked the Coreutils git repository, and it appears that similar 
constructs are still present in its latest bootstrap version.  I don't 
know whether there are other Bash-specific constructs present.

It appears that Coreutils, like Bison, requires repository users to 
install Autotools, Gettext, etc, so it's probably not too much to ask them 
to install Bash as well.  However, it's not clear to me if we should 
assume Bash can then be found at /bin/bash.  What do you think?

Thanks.