Re: [Groff] Re: groff build/release engineering

[MARSHALL Keith]

> The Linux-isms that appear to be pervading groff are not primarily
> about gnu make. It's things like hardwiring /bin/bash into the
> autoconfiguration. First of all, no absolute pathname should ever be
> hard-wired into configure. And in the case of groff, this pathname
> ends up in the Makefile, even if /bin/bash doesn't exist! To make
> matters worse, it seems to be there so that make can run shdeps.sh
> which is a *Bourne* shell script. So there appears to have been no
> need for bash in the first place even if its correct pathname was
> used. This kind of thing is very disturbing. And it seems to pervade
> the Linux world.

shdeps.sh *definitely* does not require bash -- I *know* this, because
*I* wrote it, together with its accompanying Makefile.sub

In fact, shdeps.sh gets run by whatever $(SHELL) says, in the Makefile,
and this gets set by configure -- it *should* match whatever is exported
by *your* primary shell, as $SHELL.  When *I* configure and make groff
on my Win2K box, the top level Makefile says SHELL=/bin/sh, and shdeps.sh
gets run by /bin/sh -- *not* /bin/bash -- so I don't know where all this
rubbish about a dependency on bash, and hardwiring it into configure, is
comming from -- the shebang in shdeps.sh even says '#!/bin/sh', although
this is not really relevant, due to the Makefile invocation syntax, which
forces the use of the shell selected by configure.

Regards,
Keith.