Re: [PATCH] Minor improvements in bootstrap script.

[Eric Blake]

On 06/10/2010 03:13 AM, Stefano Lattarini wrote:
>> Will that always work on mingw, where you are not guaranteed the
>> existence of /bin/sh?
> Honestly, I dind't think that there were systems missing /bin/sh which
> could be targets for automake :-(
> Anyway, the old bootstrap script too assumed existence of /bin/sh,
> since the temporary script `boot$$.sh' contained the shebang line
> "#! /bin/sh".  Right?

Not necessarily.  If I understand correctly, the MSYS environment knows
that if a file is not a PE-COFF executable, but does have a she-bang,
that it must be a shell script. So rather than invoking /bin/sh, which
doesn't necessarily exist, it invokes sh (relying on a PATH search to
find it).  For that matter, it could always invoke sh, regardless of the
she-bang, because bash knows how to re-invoke an interpreter based on
the she-bang (or, it is pretty easy to patch the MSYS port of bash to do
that).  But the point is that the MSYS environment tries hard to avoid
dictating layout of the file system, and does everything relative to
PATH, since Windows systems do not have nearly the same notion of a
common layout as Unix-like systems.

>> Then again, mingw is one of the platforms where you want the
>> path separator to be detected as ; rather than :.
> True; thus the script still works correctly, even if just by chance.

So I guess I'm okay with your patch as is, but it's up to Ralf at this
point.

-- 
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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