Re: [PATCH] Catch errors properly, if whoami or who don't exist

[Rob Savoye]

On 9/8/24 6:15 PM, Jacob Bachmeyer wrote:

> So the logs were not sitting on a shared server, then.  Perhaps a notion 
> of credit-where-credit-is-due to the testers?

  In those days we were still using UUCP over Telebit Trailblazer 
modems. :-) The shared server came by years later when we built the big 
build farm for cross testing. At one point we were testing 144 
host/target variations of GCC in a fully automated fashion for every 
release. Pre-github, no Gerrit or Jenkins, the dinosaur days of CI...

> I am still inclined to keep it, but perhaps we should check if the 
> working directory or source tree is a Git checkout, and if so, use the 

  Some people would be running DejaGnu from an installed package, so 
git wouldn't work. If LOGNAME doesn't exist, I'd just set it to "unknown".

> Also, do you remember what system used `who am i` instead of `whoami` 
> and why DejaGnu extracts the second /[ !]/-delimited field from that 
> command's output?

  Back then DejaGnu had to run a wide variety of Unixes. Pure System V, 
BSD variants, SunOs/Solaris, Unixware, HPUX, IRIX, AIX, NextOS, MSDOS, 
plus the crazy Canadian cross to build a cross compiler that ran on 
Windows. I can't remember which system used "who am I", but there was a 
huge amount of weird obscure differences between systems we just had to 
deal with. That's one of the things that made the GNU toolchain so 
popular, it ran on almost anything, so your code became truly portable. 
That was a big deal in the late 80s into the early 90s due to vendor 
lock-in with proprietary compilers.

        - rob -