[Libreoffice] Error in autogen.sh of rawbuild : Bad substitution

[Tor Lillqvist]

>>> On 2010-12-02 at 08:44, <eagles051387 at gmail.com> wrote:
> what is the difference between using /bin/sh and /bin/bash?

It's morning, so I feel like rambling:

/bin/bash, if it exists, presumably can always be assumed to be Bash, the GNU "Bourne-Again" Shell. Hopefully some relatively recent version of it. 

On some Unixes, Bash is not always included in a normal installation, but any machine intended for serious development probably has it installed anyway, in best cases from some official or semi-official Unix version specific add-on repository. But not necessarily as /bin/bash.

When I administered and used HP-UX and Solaris machines in the 1990--2005 timeframe I used to have the Bash that I had built myself installed as /opt/gnu/bin/bash. Nowadays, the semi-official location of Bash in Solaris is /usr/sfw/bin/bash, I think.

In other Unixes Bash might have some other semi-official location. On some of the BSDs it is /usr/local/bin/bash I think. Etc.

Note that Bash is *required* to build LibreOffice. (A requirement inherited from OOo.) That is not going to change. But we are trying hard to avoid requiring Bash to be installed as /bin/bash.

As for /bin/sh, the only thing one can say for sure is that it is some kind of Bourne style shell. It used to be that one could not even be sure that it was a POSIX compliant shell. For instance on Solaris, back when I used it heavily, it wasn't. A POSIX compliant shell was /usr/xpg4/bin/sh, if I recall correctly. But I hope that by now one can be fairly sure that /bin/sh is a POSIX compliant shell, or at least that we don't require any features in /bin/sh that some platform we support doesn't offer in it.

On some Linux distros /bin/sh might just be the same Bash that is also available as /bin/bash. But not all.

I fully understand that Linux is all that what many of you care for... but as far as I know, we want LibreOffice to be portable to any serious current desktop Unix OS. No matter how irrelevant some parts of the "community" might think that Unix is, "market share" -wise. So we need to take these things into consideration.

Hope this helps, have a nice day.

--tml