tlmgr fails on Solaris 10

[George N. White III]

On Fri, 12 Feb 2021 at 11:04, Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk>
wrote:

> which is a very old OS, but we still have a box running for
> software-testing purposes.
>
> The problem is line 261 of TLUtils.pm,
>
>        chomp (my $guessed_platform = `/bin/sh '$config_guess'`);
>
> It seems config.guess has been taken from GNU Autoconf which tries hard
> to run it under a suitable shell, preferably Bash.  On Solaris /bin/sh
> is a real Bourne shell, but config.guess uses extensions and Autoconf
> has never used it.
>

> My workaround has been to replace /bin/sh by /bin/bash, but
> unfortunately that needs to be done every time the infrastructure is
> updated.  It would be kinder to have a fix upstream.
>

Upstream is GNU, but would it be enough for texlive to distribute
config.bash
with the shebang line modified to use bash (maybe even "#! /usr/bin/env
bash" so
users could provide a bash)?

There is a need for easy mechanisms to catch such gratuitous
incompatibilities.
Upstream developers are not always interested in supporting a wide variety
of OS's,
so integrators like texlive (and R) are left to deal with changes that
affect their users.

It might be helpful to have a lowest common  denominator option in
checkbashisms
that reports use of constructs missing on some /bin/sh instances.

-- 
George N. White III
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