Re: How to change the shebang in 'configure' to require Bash

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Tue, 20 Mar 2018, Russell Shaw wrote:
> If autoconf'd programs required the end users to have an installation-shell 
> that is ported to all systems of interest, then the learning requirements of 
> autoconf users should be a lot less.

This has all been discussed many times before.  If it had been decided 
that installing some other package would be a prerequisite for 
running configure, then this issue would not exist.  However, that 
decision was never made.  The precursor to Autoconf was Perl's 
Configure, which was/is shell-based.

If some other package could be a prerequisite then making the 
prerequisite a Bourne like shell with a m4 pre-processor would be a 
silly choice since shell scripts are a very poor choice to meet 
configure's requirements.

A specially-crafted language syntax would be a better choice to meet 
configure requirements in order to avoid obscure and inefficient 
m4/shell/sed syntax.

Regardless, Autoconf ultimately works well and the shell script part 
of the effort that a configure script implementor must create is 
usually not very difficult at all.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/