Don't use bash-specific scripting in the Makefile

[humenda]

In one of the Makefiles, SHELL=bash is set. It's questionable whether depending on a particular shell, especially from a Makefile, is a good idea.

[decentral1se]

whether depending on a particular shell

But it's the most likely shell? On which *NIX-like system is bash not installed?

Just passing by and saw this, I'm no Makefile expert either ;)

[humenda]

> whether depending on a particular shell But it's the most likely shell? On which *NIX-like system is bash not installed?

Debian's default shell is dash, for performance reasons, I believe. I am not sure whether a minimal system would install bash, these days. On my Debian 9.0 machine, actually only three of the installed packages depend on bash. I don't have anything against Bash, I personally would just like to avoid depending on one particular shell. I'm open for objections.

[decentral1se]

Debian's default shell is dash, for performance reasons, I believe.

Ah, I did not know. Seems like you are on the right track then 👍

[joostvb-gh]

On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 08:26:07AM -0700, Sebastian Humenda wrote: >> whether depending on a particular shell > >But it's the most likely shell? On which *NIX-like system is bash not >installed? Debian's default shell is dash, for performance reasons, I believe. I am not sure whether a minimal system would install bash, these days.

Debian's default /bin/sh is dash, indeed. The default user login shell is bash. I believe indeed if you try hard you could create a minimal Debian system without bash.

On my Debian 9.0 machine, actually only three of the installed packages depend on bash. I don't have anything against Bash, I personally would just like to avoid depending on one particular shell. I'm open for objections.

It's "nice to have", to be able to build and run freedict with any bourne-compatible shell. However, if in some Makefile specific bash-features are needed and used, I feel depending upon bash is not a big deal. Only if one has too much time on one's hands, one could work on reimplemting the needed functionality in pure bourne shell code. Explicitly specifying SHELL=/bin/bash would yield just one extra package in the list of build-time dependencies. Just a remark here, not an objection :) Bye, Joost

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[humenda]

I was reconsidering this issue. I think the remarks on "most of the systems have bash" are actually true. I would rather Since this is very low priority at the moment, I close this issue. For new code in makefiles, I do want to see POSIX and non-bash-specific code and if anybody has the time to work on tis rather simple issue, please feel free to submit a PR.
Thanks