Netbeans 3.6Beta runide.sh fails on FreeBSD 5.2R

[Greg Lewis]

On Fri, Feb 13, 2004 at 06:36:17PM +0100, Markus Svensson wrote:
> I'm a member of the Netbeans 3.6 Community Acceptance Program (fancy word for 
> bug hunter, I guess). I'm experiencing some issues with the runide.sh 
> launcher script, which I hoped would be resolved by the Netbeans developers. 
> But it appears that it won't be fixed, since fixing the script breaks it from 
> MacOS X and Linux users. Anyone interested, please check out the discussion 
> at http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=39830 and perhaps somebody 
> can explain to me what why the JDK's on different platforms don't support the 
> same parameters?

I read the bug, and it doesn't look like it has anything to do with the
JDKs using different parameters.  It looks like it has everything to do
with different syntaxes for the expr utility.

Here is the issue (from expr(1)):

Unless FreeBSD 4.x compatibility is enabled, this version of expr adheres
to the POSIX Utility Syntax Guidelines, which require that a leading
argument beginning with a minus sign be considered an option to the
program.  The standard -- syntax may be used to prevent this
interpretation.

e.g.

> expr -J-Xms24m : '-J\(.*\)'
expr: illegal option -- J
usage: expr [-e] expression

However, note the first part of the quote from the man page!  So, a
possibly solution is for runide.sh to set the EXPR_COMPAT environment
variable.  Then things will work, e.g.:

> env EXPR_COMPAT=1 expr -J-Xms24m : '-J\(.*\)'
-Xms24m

So, I would suggest adding these two lines to the script:

EXPR_COMPAT=1
export EXPR_COMPAT

Then it will (hopefully) work on FreeBSD.

I will note strongly that its Linux and OSX which are broken in this
respect though.  FreeBSD is POSIX compliant, they are not.

-- 
Greg Lewis                          Email   : glewis at eyesbeyond.com
Eyes Beyond                         Web     : http://www.eyesbeyond.com
Information Technology              FreeBSD : glewis at FreeBSD.org