Re: [Texmacs-dev] /bin/sh vs. /bin/bash in Ubuntu

[Andrey G. Grozin]

On Sat, 25 Apr 2009, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
> This /bin/sh issue comes up every now and then; a pain.
> In principle, as long as we no not use any bash-specific stuff,
> then we probably should stick to /bin/sh.
>
> Andrey, do you remember the previous conclusions on this subject?
Maybe, I don't remember all issues, this was discussed many times. One I 
remember is 'type -p' vs. 'which'. Initially, I used 'which' in 
maxima_detect. This was inconvenient for cygwin: it not always has 'which' 
(I never used cygwin; my understanding (maybe wrong) is that it has some 
package system, and 'which' is available in some package, but it is not 
installed by default). 'which' was replaced by 'type -p', which is 
bash-specific. More recently, 'type -p' was replaced (in many scripts in 
/usr/libexec/TeXmacs/bin) by 'which', to make these scripts more 
sh-compatible. Has the cygwin problem disappeared somehow?

In any case, currently (1.0.7.2) all scripts in /usr/libexec/TeXmacs/bin 
use 'which', except tm_mathematica (it still uses 'type -p'). I think it 
would be good to replace 'type -p' by 'which' in tm_mathematica, for 
consistency. Though this script is hardly used by anybody: it worked 
more-or-less well with mathematica-4.*, and the current version is 7, many 
things don't work anymore :-(

I don't know what other bash-specific features are used in these scripts. 
Probably, there are some, because there is some breakage on ubuntu. Ubuntu 
users can investigate what scripts (and what lines in them) don't work in 
the expected way.

Andrey