On 2025-04-25 at 18:07:18, Eli Schwartz wrote: > On 4/25/25 1:04 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote: > > Now I am showing my ignorance, but does this support folks whose > > shell are not spelled "sh" (like "/usr/local/bin/dash"), and more > > importantly, if it does not, shouldn't we be using a mechanism that > > does? I think -Dsane_tool_path=/usr/local/bin would help with the > > leading directory path, but I suspect that find_program() does not > > help specifying "dash" to be used as our target_shell (or host > > shell), or "perl5" as our perl. > > > > Of course, this "my sh is called dash" can be left totally outside > > of the topic of these two patches. > > > POSIX does not require a specific absolute file path for "sh", but it > does mandate that you have a shell and its name is "sh", whichever > directory it may be found in. > > There is (most of the time) not actually a program called "sh". Various > different programs may provide a symlink "sh", pointing to their own shell: > > - GNU Bash (bash) > - Korn Shell (ksh93) > - Policy-compliant Ordinary Shell (Debian `posh`) > - Almquist Shell (ash) > - Debian Almquist Shell (dash) > - busybox > - MirBSD Korn Shell (mksh) All of what you said here is true, but I will point out that AT&T ksh (ksh93 and also ksh88) doesn't support `local`. All of the others do, as do other pdksh derivatives (like OpenBSD's sh and ksh[0]). I believe on NonStop that `sh` is AT&T ksh, so there is no program or symlink named `sh` on the system which meets our needs. The customary option there is to use bash instead. Additionally, Debian allows zsh as `/bin/sh`, since it meets their requirements, but older versions do not run all elements of a pipeline in a subshell, which, while allowed by POSIX as an extension, practically breaks our code (and lots of other code as well). (New versions contain a patch I sent that fixes this behaviour when in `sh` mode.) As a result, a user compiling their own Git might need to specify something that is not `sh` on such a system. And Junio points out correctly that some systems have Perl as `perl5`, not `perl`. (Mostly in environments that once had or still have Perl 4.) So all that to say that we do need to be able to specify an arbitrary path to a binary in order for things to work on some systems. [0] Which are the same thing. -- brian m. carlson (they/them) Toronto, Ontario, CA
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