In 4cba20fbdc6 (meson: prefer shell at "/bin/sh", 2025-04-25) we have
addressed an issue where the shell path embedded into Git was looked up
via PATH, which easily led to unportable shell paths other than the
usual "/bin/sh" location. The fix was to simply add '/bin' to the search
path explicitly, which made us prefer that directory over the PATH-based
lookup.
This fix causes issues on MINGW64 though, which uses Windows-style
paths. "/bin" is not an absolute Windows-style path, but Meson expects
the directories to be absolute. This leads to the following error:
meson.build:248:15: ERROR: Search directory /bin is not an absolute path.
Fix this by instead searching for both '/bin/sh' and 'sh', which also
causes us to prefer '/bin/sh' over a PATH-based lookup. Meson does
accept that path alright on MINGW64, even though it's not an absolute
Windows-style path, either.
Furthermore, this continues to work alright with cross-files, as well,
in case one wants to explicitly override the shell path:
$ meson setup build
...
Runtime executable paths
perl : /nix/store/gy10hw004rl2xfbfq41vnw0yb1w8rvbl-perl-5.40.0/bin/perl
python : /nix/store/sd81bvmch7njdpwx3lkjslixcbj5mivz-python3-3.13.4/bin/python3
shell : /bin/sh
$ cat >cross.ini <<-EOF
[binaries]
sh = '/nix/store/94lg0shvsfc845zy8gnflvpqxxiyijbz-bash-interactive-5.2p37/bin/bash'
EOF
$ meson setup build --cross-file=cross.ini --wipe
...
Runtime executable paths
perl : /nix/store/gy10hw004rl2xfbfq41vnw0yb1w8rvbl-perl-5.40.0/bin/perl
python : /nix/store/sd81bvmch7njdpwx3lkjslixcbj5mivz-python3-3.13.4/bin/python3
shell : /nix/store/94lg0shvsfc845zy8gnflvpqxxiyijbz-bash-interactive-5.2p37/bin/bash
Signed-off-by: Patrick Steinhardt <ps@xxxxxx>
---
meson.build | 2 +-
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
diff --git a/meson.build b/meson.build
index 4f22d72641e..bef80b118a8 100644
--- a/meson.build
+++ b/meson.build
@@ -245,7 +245,7 @@ time = find_program('time', dirs: program_path, required: get_option('benchmarks
# "/bin/sh" over a PATH-based lookup, which provides a working shell on most
# supported systems. This path is also the default shell path used by our
# Makefile. This lookup can be overridden via `program_path`.
-target_shell = find_program('sh', dirs: program_path + [ '/bin' ], native: false)
+target_shell = find_program('/bin/sh', 'sh', dirs: program_path, native: false)
# Sanity-check that programs required for the build exist.
foreach tool : ['cat', 'cut', 'grep', 'sort', 'tr', 'uname']
--
2.50.0.195.g74e6fc65d0.dirty
