Makefile and SHELL

[Bjoern Michaelsen]

Hi,

On Tue, May 07, 2013 at 02:01:25AM +0200, Mat M wrote:
> In Makefile.in, we enforce bash with SHELL=/usr/bin/env bash, but we
> state that the build should be posix enabled (at least I was told
> that :)) , so why not SHELL=/usr/bin/env sh or SHELL=/bin/sh (or
> nothing, since latter is default) ?

so gbuild originally was posix compliant (it had to work on Solaris). It seems,
over time some bashisms creeped in. IIRC Michael Stahl made some performance
measurements showing that dash (which is the default on e.g. debian-based
distros) has a significant performance edge on startup, so it might actually
make sense to kill bashisms with extreme prejudice.
Note that depending hard on bash might make e.g. teh *BSD folks unhappy.

Best,

Bjoern