Re: GNUism in groff tests, was: pic anomalies

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2019-12-30T17:14:12+0100, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> I had a closer look and it turns out all nine failing tests start
> with the line
> 
>   #!/usr/bin/env bash

That's my fault.

> I just temporarily installed bash(1) for testing purposes to make sure
> that's currently the only problem, and it is: with bash(1) installed,
> all 14 tests currently succeed.
> 
> But i deleted /usr/local/bin/bash again, right away.

I would cast a stone here, but it's difficult--as you are allergic to
bash, I am allergic to BitKeeper.  ;-)

> As long as these tests use bash(1), i'm very reluctant to do that,
> even though in general, running a test suite certainly makes sense
> before you commit a package update.  Given the so far very small
> test coverage, the tests don't help much for package testing yet.
> Then again, that is likely to improve in the future, so having them
> portable would be nice...

I don't mind limiting ourselves to portable POSIX sh, but let's please
not dumb the scripts down any further than that.  In particular we do
not need to write in "autoconf shell", which attempts to work around
every bug in every implementation of /bin/sh that has ever existed and
has far too many rules for any human to remember.

I do regret losing the elegance of:

diff <(expected) <(actual)

It was a beautiful thing when Tom Duff documented it for the rc shell[1]
and it's still lovely today.

Regards,
Branden

[1] http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/rc

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