H.Merijn Brand <h.m.brand@xs4all.nl> wrote:
Projects that require features - like bash functionality - that is not available on those proprietary OS's will cause the support on those OS's to halt. e.g.
If you depend on proprietary bash features, you are not portable. This is why POSIX exists. I modified a few shell scripts from OpenSolaris to no longer depend on ksh93 to be able to use "bosh" as /bin/sh and /sbin/sh for the basic startup before /usr gets mounted. On the other side: as long as bash stays portable it is not a real problem to use bash as long as you put #!/bin/bash in the first line of your script. I guess this will not change as long as bash stays a one man show with the original maintainer.
? GNU gcc is by now impossible to build on HP-UX. ? Projects that switch(ed) to meson/ninja won't build outside Linux ? Projects that require new(er/est) gcc won't build on OS's that won't build gcc
It is bad to see that some GNU projects more and more implement the embrace and extent method from Microcoft to create a vendor lock in instead of using POSIX features that are portable.
I know that OSS developer time is "free" time and voluntary work, but remember that choosing the tool-of-the-day will cause headaches for those that use their free time to port OSS to those OS's that are not mainstream anymore.
This is e.g. why the ksh93 from Redhat no longer compiles on Solaris. The background in this case BTW. is missing skills by the related people.
Story from the past: we had to switch from SCCS to something more recent. The team chose SVN. Our main development environment by the time was HP-UX 11.23, and we had to give up on SVN: we needed a week to build SVN from scratch with all its dependencies only to see it horribly fail. We then decided to try git. We just needed 3 hours to get it up and running, including the GUI's. *I* do not regret this, as I had a preference of git over svn from the start, and by now all our developers are used to git/gitlab and it is part of daily routine.
Well, I could never understand why peole would like to use svn as it is as slow as CVS and as it did even cause some projects to loose all their history after a internal change of the datastructures.
If bash were to switch from make to meson/ninja, you'd rule out the use of modern bash on those weird OS's, as bash still is relative easy to build/port. (and so is "make")
Well writing makefiles that depend on "gmake" is a bad practice, but it is still better than using something else. If you are interested in a portable POSIX certified make program, I recommend to use the "SunPro Make" from schilytools. Jörg -- EMail:joerg@schily.net (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin joerg.schilling@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sf.net/projects/schilytools/files/' -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org