Re: [platform-testers] verification instructions for groff 1.23.0.rc2

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi Dagobert,

Thank you for the report!  I believe you have identified a non-POSIX-
conforming shell and grep utilty on Solaris 10.  Judging by the domain
name from which you're sending your email, I might be recapitulating
facts already known to you below.

At 2023-02-06T10:35:56+0100, Dagobert Michelsen wrote:
> >> groff 1.23 release candidate 2, 1.23.0.rc2, is now available
[...]
> I just tested on Solaris 10 with Sun Studio and encounter some
> problems with the test scripts, e.g.
> contrib/mm/tests/LT_SP_AU_without_AT_works.sh:
> 
> - on Solaris /bin/sh is not bash

Indeed not.  I've tried to write my test scripts in expectation of a
POSIX-conforming shell and utilities.

>   and does not understand subshell invocation with $(cmd).

Any POSIX-confirming shell should understand "$(cmd)",[1] going back to
Issue 4[2] (1994) at least.  But the default shell in Solaris before
version 11 is notorious for non-coonformance.[3]

> - the /usr/bin/grep on Solaris does not understand -Eqx as used e.g.
>   in contrib/mm/tests/LT_SP_AU_without_AT_works.sh

Here again I brazenly assumed POSIX-conforming utilities.[4]

>   It would be good to use a replacement of $SHELL with the test
>   scripts as automake inputs.  This would allow packagers to choose a
>   usable shell here without syntactic replacement.

>   It would be nice to use $GREP here in a similar way as the shell
>   above.

I will look into how easily that may be done.  I don't see anything
directly on point in the GNU Automake manual[5], so if you can point out
a working exhibit--preferably one that won't mean having to rename 160+
test scripts in Git to have an ".in" suffix--it might help me out.

Thank you again for the report.

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3_chap02.html
    (§ 2.6.3)
[2] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xcu/chap2.html#tag_001_006_003
    (PDF page 58)
[3] 
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/218060/which-shells-dont-support-dollar-parenthesis-expansion-and-demand-backticks
[4] 
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799.2018edition/utilities/grep.html
    https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/grep.html
    https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xcu/grep.html
    https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009656399/toc.pdf
    (PDF page 376ff.)
[5] https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/html_node/Tests.html

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