Re: Success (mostly) with the testsuite

[Daniele Arena]

Hi Akim,

Glad that you finally got the "bug".

On 25 Oct 2000, Akim Demaille wrote:

> OK, then the problem is that your shell is bad at following escaped
> quotes.  What I changed is this snippet:

[...]

> I remove the 
> 
>         cannot find input file \\\`$f'
> 
> part of the error messages.  This is a real pain.  Is your system
> really `alive' in the sense that other people might use it today?
> Isn't it a system that its users should update?  Because if it is,
> maybe we can diagnose that it is too broken.  Otherwise we will have
> to struggle a lot to get something working on it.

This is a nice question. Thanks for asking.:) I'll put aside my personal
considerations, and advocate the cause of BSDI 3.1 . This OS is indeed
quite old-fashioned (last version is 4.1), but probably no more than AIX
3.2 is. AFAIK, it is not "broken" in the sense that an OS upgrade is
recommended. We here are using it a lot as a desktop OS. True, we're not
making an intensive use of Autoconf, and have other platforms where we can
run it. But it could become harder if other GNU packages start to become
uncompilable. I don't know, apart from us, how many people are using this
OS in the world.

That actually brings a "philosophical" question I always wanted to ask to
GNU people (RMS, are you there?:); and that is, how far goes the support
for oldish OSs in GNU packages? (More so in a "key" package like
autoconf). Is there a list of obsoleted OSs for which you do not grant
functionality? Did I maybe miss the answer to that in some FAQ?

> Do you install GNU package by hand on your system?  Do they compile
> cleanly?  For instance, can you compile the textutils?

I had no problem until now. I hadn't compiled textutils until 20 minutes
ago, but now I did and it all went smoothly.

I guess you'll have to decide if you want to support BSDI 3.1 or not...
BTW, I unfortunately have no BSDI 4.1 where to test to see if the shell
behaviour has changed or not.

Whatever happens, thanks for the good job you're doing!

> Anyway, I'd propose simply not to use `$f' here, but simply this:

[...]

> But it bugs me somewhat.
> 
> Maybe we should go to using `read'.  Pavel, Alexandre, what would you
> say?  I confess I'm quite attached to a standard layout of the error
> messages, hence I do prefer the original.
> 
> Or we go back to the old and painful way of creating that list :(
> 
> Is xargs portable?
> 


Cheers,

Daniele.