FW: shell choice freebsd git port

[Jilles Tjoelker]

On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 10:47:53AM -0400, Wesley Shields wrote:
> As the maintainer of devel/git I'd like this port to do the right thing,
> but I'm not sure if this is a legitimate bug in our /bin/sh or not.
> Anyone care to comment on this?

> ----- Forwarded message from Jeff King <peff at peff.net> -----

> Date: Sun, 22 Mar 2009 05:37:10 -0400
> From: Jeff King <peff at peff.net>
> To: wxs at freebsd.org
> Subject: shell choice freebsd git port

> Hi,

> I'm one of the upstream developers of git, and it looks like you are the
> git ports maintainer for FreeBSD. I wanted to discuss an issue which you
> may run into while packaging git 1.6.2.1.

> It seems that FreeBSD's /bin/sh treats blank lines in an eval as a
> successful command. E.g., (the output is from FreeBSD 6.1, but I built
> the current HEAD from anoncvs and it seems to have the same problem):

>   $ /bin/sh
>   $ eval 'false
> 
>   '
>   $ echo $?
>   0

> (whereas bash and dash would print '1').

> This is problematic for our test suite, which consists of a lot of
> eval'ing. Failing tests may be missed if their status is ignored, one
> test in 1.6.2.1 which expects a non-zero exit status actually does
> report failure when it actually succeeded. On top of that, some of the
> scripts (like bisect and filter-branch) care about the exit status of
> evals at run-time to determine whether an error occurred.

> There is some discussion on the git list here:

>   http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/112519/focus=112621

> I don't know if you want to do anything to the port to work around this.
> The obvious solution is requiring bash, and setting SHELL_PATH
> appropriately in the Makefile. You may also want to see if anyone is
> interested in treating this like a bug in /bin/sh and fixing it (I
> consider it a bug, but others may consider it historical behavior, I
> suppose).

As discussed on IRC, I think this is a bug in /bin/sh.

Just from reading the code, NetBSD does not seem to have fixed this.

The following patch seems to fix the problem:
http://www.stack.nl/~jilles/unix/sh-eval-emptyline.patch

Apart from 'eval', also 'trap', 'fc' and strings passed with '-c' are
affected.

Empty lines inside {}, if or similar constructs are treated differently
and work fine even without the patch.

-- 
Jilles Tjoelker