Re: Accounting for SHELL in ./configure

[Mohammad Akhlaghi]

Thanks Behdad,

The problem is that I do not have root permissions on the system with the faulty '/bin/sh': I cannot change '/bin/sh' and need to build my programs with a custom shell.

If the user specifies a wrong shell (not the default '/bin/sh'), it is their own responsibility that it is POSIX-compatible. The same way that a user can give a non-GNU Make executable to the GNUMAKE variable.

In short, when a user changes defaults, it is their resposibility, not the developer's. So no need to worry about that; the important thing is to give users the freedon to customize for their custom environments (as GNU Autoconf does for example; but Autoconf is not used in FreeType).

Cheers,
Mohammad

On May 1, 2024 10:25:54 PM GMT+02:00, Behdad Esfahbod <behdad@behdad.org> wrote:

There's no guarantee that the user's shell is sh-compatible. autoconf really means sh here, because that's the shell the script is written for. Just symlink your favorite shell to sh then, if it's compatible.

behdad
http://behdad.org/

On Wed, May 1, 2024 at 2:13 PM Mohammad Akhlaghi <mohammad@akhlaghi.org> wrote:

Hi again,

I was able to find a cleaner hack by running this command before the
'./configure' script:

export GNUMAKE="make SHELL=$SHELL"

Afterwards, FreeType successfully ran with my desired shell.

But generally, it would greatly help those building FreeType from source
if the configure script accounts for the 'SHELL' environment variable.

Thanks a lot for all the nice work on FreeType,
Cheers,
Mohammad

On 5/1/24 9:00 PM, Mohammad Akhlaghi wrote:
> Dear Freetype developers,
>
> I was trying to build FreeType from source and noticed that the
> './configure' script does not account for the 'SHELL' environment and
> will always use '/bin/sh'.
>
> Looking at the source of the './configure' script, I was able to fix the
> problem by manually adding a 'SHELL=$SHELL' in line 135 of the
> './configure' script:
>
> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/freetype/freetype/-/blob/master/configure?ref_type=heads#L135
>
> Accounting for the user's given SHELL is common in many programs when
> building from source, so it would be good if you could account for it in
> future versions of FreeType also.
>
> Cheers,
> Mohammad