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Re: 1,000 year backward compatability of tools
"John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu> writes:
> even Ultrix had another shell, /bin/sh5, if I remember correctly,
> that did support shell functions, and it would not have been too
> difficult for configure to attempt to find it
Recent versions of Autoconf generate "configure" scripts that do just
that, which is partly why I'm not so worried about the shell-function
issue even for Ultrix. This also may help to explain why new
"configure" start up so slowly on older boxes -- you don't get this
functionality for free, unfortunately.
Do you recall whether /bin/sh5 was a standard part of Ultrix and was
installed on every Ultrix machine? If /bin/sh5 was an option and
might not be installed, then there still might be an issue here.