[Xen-devel] Re: [PATCH] tools: python portability fixes

[Ian Jackson <Ian.Jackson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Christoph Egger writes ("Re: [PATCH] tools: python portability fixes"):
> On Tuesday 28 July 2009 11:55:59 Ian Jackson wrote:
> > While I'm here, though: you keep mentioning this as if there was
> > something wrong with this.  I think having the Xen build system depend
> > on bash being installed is absolutely fine.
> 
> On NetBSD, bash is a third-party package.
> scripts having #!/bin/bash fail with "/bin/bash: No such file or directory"
> The bourne shell (#!/bin/sh) is mighty enough to not require bashism.

I agree that it is sensible not to make scripts bash-specific for no
reason.  However, there are quite a few things that are much easier to
do in bash and require enormous amounts of pratting about to do in
POSIX sh.

Also, if we write #!/bin/sh at the top of the script, we get
complaints from Solaris people if our script is not portable to the
astonishingly ancient and crusty Solaris /bin/sh.

I don't want to get into NetBSD's decision to make bash be `a third
party package' (whatever that means), but surely there are plenty of
things in the Xen build system that are `third party packages'.  You
can't build Xen without hg and git and texinfo and GNU make and so on.
It seems to me that bash is much less of an imposition.

Ian.

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