Re: MKS Bourne Shell "case" weirdness...

[Lars J. Aas]

  Hi Paul,

Paul Eggert <address@hidden> wrote:
: "Lars J. Aas" <address@hidden> writes:
: > Is it possible that this is a local problem for the given MKS user I
: > am working with and that he may have a somewhat faulty MKS
: > installation or something?
: 
: Possibly.  It'd be nice if we could have another MKS user report what
: happens.  Or perhaps you or your user can consult the MKS bug database
: (I can't; it's private).

OK, I'll see what I can do in this regard.  I don't have access to their
bug database either.

: > When porting our autoconf/automake/libtool setup for Coin
: > (www.coin3d.org) to work on MKS, I found that I had to apply the
: > following patch to Autoconf 2.57 to get the generated config.status
: > script to behave:
: 
: Hmm, that looks pretty ad-hoc.

No doubt about that :)

: Why did you need to change just these
: case statements, and not all the case statements in Autoconf and
: Libtool?  What were the symptoms of the failure?

The symptoms were that the case didn't trigger any of the cases so
the switch-var just fell through and no code was executed.

For the argument parsing loop, this happens to very specific arguments.
We first thought the case dropped arguments with /-characters in them,
but I now believe it is something in the setup-code in the previous
iteration of that loop that causes the case to not trigger unless the
shell state is changed by running the dummy true-command.  Anyways, while
debugging the loop, adding echo of the variable being parsed caused
the bug to disappear, so that's how we ended up with the current patch.

: Do you have a small shell script that illustrates the problem?

No.  I was going to check with you guys if it was a known problem first
before digging deeper into the matter.

: Unless we understand the bug I'm a little leery of trying to insert
: "true"s seemingly at random.

I totally agree.  The bug must be figured out to make a proper fix.
It's a hassle to debug from remote though :( and I probably won't get
around to look into this further for another two weeks.

  Lars J
-- 
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away. -- PKD