Re: test suite fails if sh != bash || tar != GNU tar

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Jul 11, 2007, 03:22 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.0.999.0707102020020.3412@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0707110347580.4047@racer.site>

On Wed, 11 Jul 2007, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

> 
> Actually, Ubuntu seems to ship with dash as the default shell, and we had 
> quite some fallout from that change.

Well, part of it was really dash bugs, no? The whole "'shift' on an empty argument list" seemed to be a total and outright dash bug, and wasn't about relying on bash "features".

But we've had tons of issues with different spacing for "wc -l" etc, so yeah, the silly details matter even when there aren't outright bugs in tools.

Show 6 quoted lines

> As for GNU tar, I think that this is easily fixable if you have access to 
> non-GNU tar.  We do not use tar _ever_, except for the test suite, to 
> verify that things are working as expected.
> 
> If you could put in some time to make the tests work, that would be 
> awesome.

Yeah, it would be a good thing to get rid of any bashisms, but to _keep_ it working somebody would then need to test every once in a while that it still works ;)

		Linus