Re: Parallelization of shell scripts for 'configure' etc.

[Nick Bowler]

On 2022-06-14, Michael Orlitzky <michael@orlitzky.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2022-06-13 at 15:39 -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
>>
>> I've wanted something like this for *years* (I assigned a simpler
>> version to my undergraduates but of course it was too much to expect
>> them to implement it) and I hope some sort of parallelization like this
>> can get into production with Bash at some point (or some other shell if
>> Bash can't use this idea).
>>
>
> It looks like PaSh itself was designed and built well. The authors use
> multiple test suites and PaSh is comparable to other shells in
> correctness. Ultimately you wouldn't want a runtime dependency on
> python in your /bin/sh, but as a first step... can PaSh run ./configure
> already?

The answer seems to be no.  For fun, I just tried pash-0.8 on a configure
script and the shell itself crashes immediately.

It was very difficult to install so I might not be smart enough to use it
and botched the installation.  But pash appears to not understand shell
variables in redirections:

  % sh -c 'fd=1; echo hello >&$fd'
  hello
  % pa.sh -c 'fd=1; echo hello >&$fd'
  [multiple pages of python line noise]
  AttributeError: 'LP_union_node' object has no attribute 'narg'

It crashes even if the command with such a redirection is not executed:

  % pa.sh -c 'fd=1; if false; then echo hello >&$fd; fi'
  [similar crash]

Cheers,
  Nick