GNU bug report logs - #18612
non-portable shell substitution in configure.ac

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Package: emacs;

Reported by: Assaf Gordon <assafgordon <at> gmail.com>

Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2014 19:23:01 UTC

Severity: normal

Done: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>

Bug is archived. No further changes may be made.

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Message #5 received at submit <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Assaf Gordon <assafgordon <at> gmail.com>
To: bug-gnu-emacs <at> gnu.org
Subject: Re: [platform-testers] Emacs pretest 24.3.94
Date: Thu, 02 Oct 2014 15:22:41 -0400

Hello,

On 10/01/2014 09:13 PM, Glenn Morris wrote:
> The next (and hopefully final) pretest for what will be the 24.4 release
> of Emacs (the extensible text editor) is available at
>
>    ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/emacs-24.3.94.tar.xz
>
> Please give it as much testing as you can.

I tested it on few systems, builds OK on all the followings (amd64, with only curses support, no X):
  Debian 7.6
  gNewSense 3.1 (based on Debian 6)
  Ubuntu 14.04.1
  Trisquel 6.0.1 (based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS)
  OpenSUSE 13.1
  CentOS 6.5
  CentOS 7
  FreeBSD 10
  FreeBSD 9.3
  OpenBSD 5.5
  NetBSD 6.1.4
  DilOS 1.3.7 (OpenSolaris/Illumos-based)
  GNU Hurd/Debian 0.5 (i386)

"./configure" fails on MINIX R3.3.0/i386, but MINIX is not officially supported.

On thing I noticed, is that "configure.ac" (and thus "./configure")
has the following statement (line 38):
    srcdir="/${srcdir:0:1}${srcdir:2}"

I believe these are bash-specific variable expansions, not posix-compatible.

This appears in an MINGW-related "if" block, so I guess most of the time it is not encountered.
But in one instance, I got:
    $ ./configure
    ./configure: 3564: Syntax error: Bad substitution

Regards,
 - Assaf
This bug report was last modified 10 years and 291 days ago.

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