Re: Portability problems of "Usual Tools" not described in manual

[Eric Blake]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

According to Ralf Wildenhues on 3/17/2009 3:07 PM:
>> I'm assuming this was from an older version of coreutils?  Can someone
>> determine 'expr --version' in the broken case, to see when it was fixed?
> 
> I see one instance of this, in the 'dirname' emulation code in m4sh
> (also in install-sh).  Luckily, coreutils dirname works, so that isn't
> a problem.

How far back does the coreutils bug extend?  We already proved it was a
regression introduced some point after sh-utils 1.16.  Is there a chance
that the user's coreutils could be so old that basename is also rejected
by m4sh?  At which point, maybe we DO need to teach _AS_EXPR_PREPARE to
reject the broken coreutils expr in favor of sed?

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Cygwin)
Comment: Public key at home.comcast.net/~ericblake/eblake.gpg
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iEYEARECAAYFAknAS14ACgkQ84KuGfSFAYB0egCffIc/fxFvjdRtADAXLrUM1iIf
VQcAnRlEvkdzOrWVFc8slSf3VeRRlYfQ
=BJgq
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----