Re: bizarre failures on NetBSD 9.3 x86_64

[Bruno Haible]

Dennis Clarke wrote:
> > The error messages "shift: can't shift that many" and
> > "test: ==: unexpected operator" indicate another shell problem.
> 
> I see that and have no idea why that happens.

In fact, it's already fixed in git as well. Since 2018-02-07 already.

> So maybe we need to
> test all this on a really strict POSIX type machine which will stomp all
> over anything not strictly portable. May be a waste of time. I have a
> friend with an IBM MainFrame in his life and those things are a
> nightmare for anything that is not strictly in compliance.

It is a myth to believe that a piece of software is particularly standards
compliant because there is the label "IBM" on it. It is actually quite the
opposite: The softwares that are most standards compliant are those which
have the largest user base (because those users report issues!); software
with a small user base (such as expensive software by companies like IBM
or Oracle) tend to have significantly more standards compliance issues.
That's my experience with gnulib, which you can verify by reading the
per-function documentation of many functions in the Gnulib manual [1][2][3].

Bruno

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/posix_005fspawn.html
[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/thrd_005fjoin.html
[3] https://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/strtoimax.html