RFH: bashisms in configure script
Hi everyone,
dash recently added support for the magic variable $LINENO, which was the last
piece to make it POSIX compliant. However, this change made the autoconf-
generated configure scripts use dash to execute the script's code. Without
support for LINENO, configure scripts exec to bash automatically.
With this behaviour change, bashisms in configure scripts are now making
packages FTBFS[1]. Due to some bugs in checkbashisms, most of the code in
configure scripts was skipped, making those bashisms invisible.
An archive-wide check of the source packages gives an estimate of over 3425
source packages with bashisms in *any file*. This doesn't necessarily mean that
we are drowned by bashisms, as some of those may already be fixed by Debian-
provided packages or might affect unused code (either at the build process or
code not included in the final binary package.)
A rough estimate of the number of source packages with bashisms in configure
scripts (false positives included and not necessarily autoconf's configure
script) is 1504.
SUMMARY:
1. If your name is on the list at [2] please check at [3] the .dsc file that
corresponds to the source packages you co-/maintain, review and fix. The .dsc
files contain checkbashisms' output.
2. Do the same for other packages in the list: review, file report[4], and try
to provide a patch/NMU.
3. Do the same for other packages in [3] (which are not necessarily in the
list below): review, file report[4], try to provide a patch/NMU.
Please encourage others to work on these issues.
Normally I would process the results and file the bug reports myself but I
don't have and won't have time to do it any time soon. I've already tried to
find some time yesterday and today to work on checkbashisms to come up with bug
fixes[4], and am probably going to find a bit more to only fast-process the
results of a new run against the binary packages.
Thanks in advance!
(before anybody asks/complains, the list of maintainers is too big to be
attached to the email, even if compressed.)
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/582952
[2] http://people.debian.org/~geissert/source-bashisms/dd-list.txt
[3] http://people.debian.org/~geissert/source-bashisms/
[4] Please set "User: debian-release@lists.debian.org" and "Usertags: goal-
dash" when filing the report. Severity should be important (or serious if it
makes the package FTBFS.)
[5] See http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=497489#13 and
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=497489#40
Cheers,
--
Raphael Geissert - Debian Developer
www.debian.org - get.debian.net
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