On Mon, Sep 25, 2023, at 10:57 AM, John Cotton Ericson wrote: > On 9/25/23 10:24, Zack Weinberg wrote: > >> It is ultimately ldv's call, but Jacob's experiment is not good >> enough for me to approve. >> > So I saw Jacob's research as not demonstrating using functions is > *definitely* OK, but that has indicating it *might* be OK. Does that > sound better?
Meh. > Sure. If they show up, we can definitely revert it. But what happens > if they *don't* show up? What do you think in that case? How long are you prepared to stick to your position? How many angry e- mails are you prepared to field? > Agreed, either we should always use functions or never use functions. > (I am not worried about that overhead of functions, however.) For clarity, I was talking about the overhead of _AS_DETECT_BETTER_SHELL, not the overhead of functions themselves. > It is unclear to me whether bourne-ish shells that were new in March > 13 1992 that still didn't support shell functions, or whether there > were simply older shells still floating around in widespread use. I don't know either. What I do know is that in 1995 there were several proprietary Unix vendors that intentionally froze their /bin the way it was *before* the changes mandated by "Unix95", and I fully expect there are still computers today running *those versions* of those OSes, in conjunction with expensive equipment, like mass spectrometers and industrial robots, which still works Just Fine but the vendor longer exists. Some subset of those computers also need to need to communicate with more modern systems, which involves doing things like compiling current versions of libssl, and here we are. > Autotools should transition from "we support everything since 1984" Please understand that the last time I tried to make such a change - to autoconf proper, not to config.* - I got flamed to a crisp by the maintainer of C-Kermit. zw
