Re: Cleanup initialization of configure process (issue 549350043 by address@hidden)

[dak]

On 2020/01/16 11:22:24, hahnjo wrote:
> On 2020/01/16 10:57:46, dak wrote:
> > https://codereview.appspot.com/549350043/diff/545440043/configure.ac
> > File configure.ac (right):
> >
> >
https://codereview.appspot.com/549350043/diff/545440043/configure.ac#newcode8
> > configure.ac:8: [m4_esyscmd([. ${SRCDIR:-.}/VERSION; echo -n
> > $MAJOR_VERSION.$MINOR_VERSION.$PATCH_LEVEL])],
> > The proposal using m4_esyscmd_s allowed to use echo without -n
option (which
> is
> > a bit of a portability thing).  Was there a reason not to take it?

> I didn't notice that you changed this and just took the changes with
SRCDIR. But
> is there an actual advantage of using m4_esyscmd_s?

The bit of a portability thing?  From the autoconf documentation:

'echo'
     The simple 'echo' is probably the most surprising source of
     portability troubles.  It is not possible to use 'echo' portably
     unless both options and escape sequences are omitted.  Don't expect
     any option.

     Do not use backslashes in the arguments, as there is no consensus
     on their handling.  For 'echo '\n' | wc -l', the 'sh' of Solaris
     outputs 2, but Bash and Zsh (in 'sh' emulation mode) output 1.  The
     problem is truly 'echo': all the shells understand ''\n'' as the
     string composed of a backslash and an 'n'.  Within a command
     substitution, 'echo 'string\c'' will mess up the internal state of
     ksh88 on AIX 6.1 so that it will print the first character 's'
     only, followed by a newline, and then entirely drop the output of
     the next echo in a command substitution.

     Because of these problems, do not pass a string containing
     arbitrary characters to 'echo'.  For example, 'echo "$foo"' is safe
     only if you know that FOO's value cannot contain backslashes and
     cannot start with '-'.

     If this may not be true, 'printf' is in general safer and easier to
     use than 'echo' and 'echo -n'.  Thus, scripts where portability is
     not a major concern should use 'printf '%s\n'' whenever 'echo'
     could fail, and similarly use 'printf %s' instead of 'echo -n'.
     For portable shell scripts, instead, it is suggested to use a
     here-document like this:

          cat <<EOF
          $foo
          EOF

     Alternatively, M4sh provides 'AS_ECHO' and 'AS_ECHO_N' macros which
     choose between various portable implementations: 'echo' or 'print'
     where they work, 'printf' if it is available, or else other
     creative tricks in order to work around the above problems.


https://codereview.appspot.com/549350043/