[tlbuild] Solaris fails to process asy's Makefile

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2016-04-17 at 22:08:43 GMT, Karl Berry wrote:

 >     When I attempt to write portable scripts, do I have to consider
 >     anything which predates POSIX?
 > 
 > Later POSIX standards certainly include many features which cannot be
 > portably used, such as $(...) instead of `...`.  As for the earliest
 > POSIX sh standard, I'm not sure if there are problematic features.  If
 > it specifies -e as an operator for the builtin test, then yes, it does :).
 > 
 > In practice, Solaris /bin/sh is the problem.  (I suspect dash is more
 > featureful than Solaris sh, but I don't know it for a fact.)  Although
 > other proprietary vendor shells (AIX, etc.) have other (and worse)
 > problems, those systems are now so rare as to be ignorable.  All the
 > GNU/Linux and BSD systems have reasonable /bin/sh's by now, as far as I
 > know.
 > 
 > Here is a lengthy exhumation of various problems, mostly written in the
 > 80s and 90s:
 > https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.69/html_node/Portable-Shell.html

Hi Karl,
thank you very much for your answer and the link.  I first assumed that
a script is portable only when it doesn't use any features not
supported by the original Bourne shell.  I recently bought the famous
book "Classic Shell Scripting" and was amazed that the authors rely
entirely on POSIX.  It seems that things are more complicated.

As far as Solaris is concerned, I always thought that Solaris comes
with Bash for a couple of years.  At least someone told me.

Thanks and regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                            Phone: +49-511-3373112
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