[tex-live] configure bug WRT shell selection (was: libtool stuff)

[Frank Küster]

Frank Küster <frank at kuesterei.ch> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> can anyone tell me (or tell me who could know) how the libtool script is
> generated?  It contains a bashism in our latest builds (Debian uses dash
> as /bin/sh since a couple of weeks ago).  

The problem seems to be that, the check whether the shell understands
variable appending syntax using += is successful at configure time, but
fails at compile time.  On Debian systems, /bin/bash is usually present,
but /bin/sh points to dash (a minimalistic, fast POSIX-compliant shell).

export CONFIG_SHELL=/bin/sh

before running ./Build seems to fix the problem (I'm not yet through
with the build).


This seems to be a bug in the configure script. If I understood it
right, it has a list of candidate shells, starting with /bin/sh;
/bin/bash comes next. Instead of stopping with the first match, it also
tries and sticks with the second (the others are probably not
installed).  Thus, bash is used by configure.

Later on, the generated libtool script just uses /bin/sh which doesn't
understand bash-specific syntax.

Regards, Frank
-- 
Dr. Frank Küster
Debian Developer (TeXLive)
VCD Aschaffenburg-Miltenberg, ADFC Miltenberg
B90/Grüne KV Miltenberg