Re: Finish making zsh Bourne-compatible

[Noah Misch]

On Thu, Jun 24, 2004 at 12:10:39AM -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Noah Misch <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > I tested this change on a Fedora Core 1 system and all Autoconf
> > tests continue to pass.
> 
> Thanks for your detective work and the fix.  I installed your patch
> into Autoconf CVS.
> 
> > I really cannot run the Autoconf test suite on Mac OS X with zsh,
> > though.  It could take _weeks_.
> 
> A dumb question that I hope has a quick answer: is the problem because
> zsh is slow, or because Autoconf is doing something wrong?  (I don't
> use Mac OS X so I can't easily tell directly....)

zsh is slower than bash, but the GNU build system as a whole crawls on Mac OS X
10.1; for example, running ./bootstrap on a libtool CVS checkout takes 90 to 120
minutes.  I would like to profile it and try to locate any bottlenecks we could
smooth out, but I have no reason now to believe that the test suite itself is
doing anything wrong.

I did run the test suite with bash.  I'll analyze the failures and report back
to the list.

> > I collected enough information on quote removal behaviors in various
> > shells to add a section documenting them to the the Portable Shell
> > section of the Autoconf manual.  Would that interest folks?
> 
> Absolutely.  If it's a nontrivial change, though, we'd need to have
> you sign papers transferring copyright to the FSF.  If that's OK with
> you please let me know and I can point you in the right direction.
> 
> Thanks again for the fix.

It would be about a 50 to 200 line patch against autoconf.texi.  I am happy to
assign copyright to the FSF.

Thank you for making contributing to Autoconf easy.