textproc/asciidoc port with shells/bash dependency

[andrew clarke]

Hi,

With the recent problems involving the FreeBSD port of bash-4.0 got me
curious as to why the bash shell was installed at all on my system, as
it is not a standard component of FreeBSD.  It turns out the only
software on my system that requires bash is AsciiDoc, as a run
dependency.  Further investigation seems to indicate that it is only
used by the a2x script as supplied with AsciiDoc.  However on my
system, a2x fails anyway:

$ uname -a
FreeBSD blizzard.phoenix 6.4-RELEASE-p1 FreeBSD 6.4-RELEASE-p1 #0: Sun
Dec 21 07:56:41 UTC 2008
root at i386-builder.daemonology.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  i386

$ pkg_info | grep asciidoc
asciidoc-8.3.5      A text document format for writing short documents and man

$ a2x test.txt
readlink: illegal option -- f
usage: readlink [-n] [file ...]
a2x: failed: enhanced getopt(1) required

Assuming this isn't a fault with bash-4.0, and assuming a2x is also
broken on FreeBSD 7.x, a short-term fix would be to not install a2x to
/usr/local/bin/a2x, then the run dependency on bash could be removed.

Longer-term, given that AsciiDoc is primarily written in Python, it
seems odd to me that a2x isn't written in Python as well, which would
obviously permanently remove the run dependency on bash.

Thanks,

Regards
Andrew