Re: Ada.Command_Line and wildcards

[Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>]

>>>>> "Georg" == Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@futureapps.de> writes:

    Georg> Suppose you want to port some piece of Unix software to
    Georg> some other system, a text processing tool, say. The C
    Georg> source is in fact perfectly portable ANSI C. But it can be
    Georg> real hard to get the C source through the configure stage
    Georg> only because configuration _depends_ on original style Unix
    Georg> shells and the Unix process model (e.g. piped processes
    Georg> "within" a backtick (yes, I know $(), not the point),
    Georg> result to be assigned to some variable. The GNU "standard"
    Georg> config.guess is such a thing.)

The topic seems to have changed to standards.

There are POSIX standards, that define standard features required by
shells.

The only problem is that the POSIX standard can be a bit restrictive
at times. As a result, shells like bash define extensions to the base
standard.

However, Debian has a policy that any script that requires non-POSIX
shell features but declare itself to use /bin/bash instead of /bin/sh.

It still is a problem though, but at least it is getting addressed by
some vendors.

Then we get to the topic of autoconf/automake - I think I am not alone
on this newsgroup when I think they are ugly.... Again, the reason
they are ugly is due to a lack of standards - the requirement is to be
able to compile an application on different platforms that can be very
different.

    Georg> Yes, certainly. Now for contrast, if I log into a system
    Georg> where I participate in a *shared* account and where system
    Georg> defaults *must* not be changed, and find a huge list of
    Georg> predefined aliases.  I wasn't amused once when I found out
    Georg> that "unzip" was an alias, setting a number of options. And
    Georg> yes, I know how to disable aliases.  Having to debug shell
    Georg> setups isn't an argument in favor of typical Unix
    Georg> environments in my book, in particular if these are
    Georg> "immutable" system settings. But these seem to be the new
    Georg> Unix hackers' favorites.

This is a problem for any shared accounts, on any system, where it is
possible to adjust preferences. Different people will have different
preferences.
-- 
Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>