Subject: Re: bug#10898: test-suite output of automake-1.11.3 - it requested I send it to you!

From: Eric Blake <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2012 09:51:21 -0700

[adding autoconf]

On 02/28/2012 09:42 AM, Stefano Lattarini wrote:

>>    Ah, likely the famous ksh bug with "$@" and empty arguments:
>> 
>>      <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake-patches/2009-12/msg00037.html>

> See automake bug#10898.
> 
> At least the AT&T and OpenSolaris versions of the Korn shell have a
> strange bug regarding the expression ${1+"$@"}: when exactly *one*
> empty argument is passed to a shell function, inside that function
> the expression ${1+"$@"} will expand to *nothing*, rather than to
> to the single empty string, as one would expect.  This was causing
> a spurious failure in our testsuite when a shell suffering of this
> bug was used to run the test cases.

Yuck - this sounds like it should be documented in the autoconf manual.
 Is it only shell functions that are affected, but global use of
${1+"$@"} is still safe?

-- 
Eric Blake   [email-masked]    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org