Re: Bug in shell.el: explicit-bash-args does not work for bash 1.x

[Richard Stallman]

    There is no strong reason, but one of the recent problem I came
    across in this area is that process operations don't work properly during
    dumping (the handling of sigchld is explicitly not turned on because
    it can supposedly prevent unexec from working right).

    That prevents byte-compiling ediff with temacs, for example, because
    ediff runs `patch' (IIRC) while loading one of its .el files.

There can be a conditional to avoid running the program
if purify-flag is non-nil.