[oi-dev] Desktop Illumos Still Matters
Joerg Schilling
Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de
Wed Sep 5 19:05:12 UTC 2012
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
js at cs.tu-berlin.de (uni)
joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
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