Pending patches for generic build script

[Charles Wilson]

Igor Pechtchanski wrote:

> Ok, great!  Since you're in favor of it (and you're the ultimate authority
> on the gbs, I'm just temporarily handling the maintainer duties), it makes
> me much more confident.  I'll let Rafael test out the propagation of "set
> +e" into functions, and then make the appropriate change.

'Kay.

>>just configure with bash as my shell...the problem never seems to appear
>>when using bash.
> 
> 
> WAG: this could be related to some malloc() bug, which manifests as a
> failure in the shell's pattern matching implementation...  Can you
> reproduce this under strace?

No, and I've tried.  The problem is, it only seems to occur when running 
configure where configure's shell is sh -- and configure takes a LONG 
time to get there, launching so many subprocesses...it's unmanageable 
(multimegabytes of strace output, takes hours to run on my poor box). 
And then, the problem is non-deterministic, so it doesn't always occur 
-- and didn't occur, the few times I tried to strace.

Anyway, the problem is in launching the "reject feature names that are 
not valid shell variables" test:
   expr "x$ac_feature : ".*[^-_$as_cr_alnum]" > /dev/null &&
    <!print error message and exit!>
And expr is not a shell builtin, so I really can't explain why simply 
configuring from bash "works" and sh "sometimes doesn't work".  It just is.

I think Nicholas also ran into this issue -- Nick, care to comment?

 >>don't need the subshell -- because 'pushd' is available.  (Yes, I know

>>#!/bin/bash
>>set +e
>>...
>>mkdirs() {
>>   set +e
>>   cd ${topdir}
>>   rm -fr ${objdir} ${instdir} ${srcinstdir} || true
>>   mkdir -p ${objdir}
>>   mkdir -p ${instdir}
>>   mkdir -p ${srcinstdir}
>>}

Arg.  make that

mkdirs() {
    set +e
    pushd ${topdir}
    rm -fr ${objdir} ${instdir} ${srcinstdir} || true
    mkdir -p ${objdir}
    mkdir -p ${instdir}
    mkdir -p ${srcinstdir}
    popd
}

> I think I'll wait until all the others' patches have been applied, though,
> and then do it in one shot as one big change.

'Kay.

--
Chuck