Hi all,

Yesterday I uploaded dash with LINENO feature switched on again, which has the side effect of exposing bashisms in configure scripts. Previously, they were obscured by the fact that autoconf requires LINENO, so when choosing a shell, it selected bash,
not dash.

After some discussion on IRC I agreed that it would probably be better to revert the change and upload it to experimental instead. I will try and do a rebuild of potentially affected packages to make sure we can fix them before I try enabling LINENO
again.

[1]: https://bugs.debian.org/582952
[2]: https://bugs.debian.org/842242

--
Cheers,
Andrej

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"Andrej" == Andrej Shadura <andrew@shadura.me> writes:

Andrej> Hi all, Yesterday I uploaded dash with LINENO feature
Andrej> switched on again, which has the side effect of exposing
Andrej> bashisms in configure scripts. Previously, they were
Andrej> obscured by the fact that autoconf requires LINENO, so when
Andrej> choosing a shell, it selected bash, not dash.

Andrej> After some discussion on IRC I agreed that it would probably
Andrej> be better to revert the change and upload it to experimental
Andrej> instead. I will try and do a rebuild of potentially affected
Andrej> packages to make sure we can fix them before I try enabling
Andrej> LINENO again.

Andrej> [1]: https://bugs.debian.org/582952 [2]:
Andrej> https://bugs.debian.org/842242

Andrej> -- Cheers, Andrej


I understand that it's generally better to fix bashisms in configure
scripts.
Is it possible to force autoconf to prefer bash for a given configure
script if it's difficult or undesirable to fix bashisms in a configure
script?

Yes, I realize that it limits portability to systems with bash.
And yet, there are a lot of systems with bash:-)

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Hi Sam,

On Wed, 10 Nov 2021, at 19:18, Sam Hartman wrote:

I understand that it's generally better to fix bashisms in configure
scripts.
Is it possible to force autoconf to prefer bash for a given configure
script if it's difficult or undesirable to fix bashisms in a configure script?

Yes, passing CONFIG_SHELL=/bin/bash to configure with do the thing.

Yes, I realize that it limits portability to systems with bash.
And yet, there are a lot of systems with bash:-)

Well, we might make bash non-essential at one point. OTOH development systems are likely to have it anyway.

--
Cheers,
Andrej

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On 11/10/21 12:50 PM, Andrej Shadura wrote:

On Wed, 10 Nov 2021, at 19:18, Sam Hartman wrote:

I understand that it's generally better to fix bashisms in configure
scripts.
Is it possible to force autoconf to prefer bash for a given configure
script if it's difficult or undesirable to fix bashisms in a configure
script?

Yes, passing CONFIG_SHELL=/bin/bash to configure with do the thing.

Can we just enable LINENO in dash then, let the other packages FTBFS,
and people who care about the packages that FTBFS can either:

A) Fix the bashisms, or
B) Add CONFIG_SHELL=/bin/bash to their ./configure invocation.

bash is currently Essential, so there's no need for a Build-Depends on
bash for option B right now.

A might be easy, and B is definitely trivial.

It sounds like there are real benefits to enabling LINENO in dash.
LINENO support is apparently required by POSIX, so this fixes dash in
that regard (582952 comment #10) and for those packages using autoconf
without bashisms, dash will speed them up (842242 comment #5).

Bug #582952 (the first time LINENO was enabled in dash) was from 2010. I understand reverting the change to dash if it was near a release. But
that's not the case right now and at this point, it's been ELEVEN YEARS.
It's time to move forward.

--
Richard


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"Andrej Shadura" <andrew@shadura.me> writes:

Well, we might make bash non-essential at one point. OTOH development
systems are likely to have it anyway.

A compromise could be to make it build-essential instead.

- ilmari

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Quoting Richard Laager (2021-11-10 20:16:31)

Can we just enable LINENO in dash then, let the other packages FTBFS, and people who care about the packages that FTBFS can either:

in the best case, a package will FTBFS but it can also happen that the configure script will just do something different without failing. The right way to approach this if we want LINENO support in dash would be to rebuild all packages affected by this with and without dash with LINENO support and check if those that do not FTBFS still build bit-by-bit reproducibly.

Thanks!

cheers, josch
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Speaking as the /de facto/ upstream maintainer of autoconf, is there anything we could do from our end to make it easier for dash to turn $LINENO back on? I don't have a lot of time to work on autoconf at the moment, but this particular issue is
important to me. I'd like to see all the configure scripts that *don't* have bashisms in them run at dash's speed on Debian, and the fallback code for when $LINENO isn't available at all is a monstrosity that I would like to scrap.

zw

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