Re: [PATCH] tools/configure: drop BASH configure variable

[Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@citrix.com>]

On 29/06/2020 14:34, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Andrew Cooper writes ("[PATCH] tools/configure: drop BASH configure variable"):
>> This is a weird variable to have in the first place.  The only user of it is
>> XSM's CONFIG_SHELL, which opencodes a fallback to sh, and the only two scripts
>> run with this are shebang sh anyway, so don't need bash in the first place.
> Thanks for this cleanup.  I agree with the basic idea.
>
> However, did you run these scripts with dash, or review them, to check
> for bashisms ?

Yes, to all of the above.

They are both very thin wrappers (doing some argument shuffling) around
large AWK scripts.

>> Make the mkflask.sh and mkaccess_vector.sh scripts executable, drop the
>> CONFIG_SHELL, and drop the $BASH variable to prevent further use.
> Since the build currently uses bash for these, a more neutral change
> would be to change to #!/bin/bash at the same time.

That will break FreeBSD, which has no `bash` in sight.

>> RFC for 4.14.  This is a cleanup to the build system.
> I see this already has a release-ack.  However, I would not have
> recommended granting one at least on the basis of the description
> above.
>
> I agree that this is cleanup.  But the current situation is not buggy.
> I'm not sure exactly what the release criteria are but ISTM that this
> patch adds risk to the release rather than removing it.

I agree that the current state of play isn't a major issue, but having
./configure check for bash is buggy for both uses.

~Andrew