Re: PATCH: eliminate backtick substitution

[Dmitry V. Levin]

Hi Karl,

I'm Cc'ing Ben who is the author of this change in hope he would be able
to comment.

On Wed, Dec 02, 2020 at 04:19:10PM -0700, Karl Berry wrote:
>     Solaris 10
> 
> Well, it is true that Solaris 10 /bin/sh does not understand $(...).
> 
>     "Configure scripts will automatically locate a shell that supports
> 
> Yes, I saw that too. Which is fine for autoconf's configure scripts (and
> I'm very glad they're doing it), but what about when config.{guess,sub}
> are executed from something other than autoconf-generated configure
> scripts? Autoconf is not the whole world, by a long shot.
> 
>     https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/082
> 
> Thanks for the pointer. I remain completely unconvinced.  The various
> points are merely described as things like
> "non-obvious ... convenient ... nicer ..."  In other words, there is no
> technical reason to force out `...` for $(...), just cosmetic reasons.
> Sure, I wouldn't recommend `...` in a primer for shell programming, but
> config.* is hardly that.
> 
> It is perfectly possible to use `...` correctly and portably, and an
> awful lot of work has gone into doing so. I don't know of any problems
> with the use of `...` in config.* (or autoconf for that matter). For
> something as fundamental as config.*, the switch seems a bad idea to me.
> FWIW ...
> 
> I doubt it's an inviting prospect for config.* to also try to find and
> re-execute with a good shell, though that's another option.
> 
> Thanks for considering,
> Karl

-- 
ldv