[oi-dev] Desktop Illumos Still Matters

[Joerg Schilling]

Bob Friesenhahn <bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us> wrote:

> On Wed, 5 Sep 2012, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> >
> > As a nice hint: The new Bourne Shell compiles and runs on Cygwin (thanks to no
> > longer depending on sbrk(2)) and if you use it to interpret autoconf scripts,
> > this is 3x faster than bash.
>
> This sounds great.  How does its performance compare with 'dash'?
>
> Are the various issues described in the GNU Autoconf portability notes 
> (http://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.69/html_node/Portable-Shell.html#Portable-Shell) 
> avoided/fixed by this shell?  SunOS's stagnant /bin/sh has been a 
> continuing issue with POSIX shell script portability.  As a result, 
> Autoconf configure scripts typically elect to re-run themselves with 
> bash (the World's Slowest Shell) on Solaris sytems.  If this shell is 
> indeed good enough for Autoconf configure scripts, then it would be 
> good to submit an Autoconf patch so that future configure scripts know 
> how to detect and use it.

Given the fact that GNU autoconf has been more or less destroyed after release 
2.13, so I personally base my work on an extremely enhanced gnu autoconf 2.13.
The timing tests I did run, have been run with my enhanced autoconf-2.13

Autoconf 2.13 works with all known shells - I have no idea why the FSF stopped 
to support this. I suspect that this is just a bash marketing action.

The problem why newer GNU autoconf versions are so slow may be that they call 
a bew bash for each single test unless /bin/sh is bash - what you don't like to 
have on a POSIX compliant system.

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
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