Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!oliveb!sun!gorodish!guy
From: guy@gorodish.Sun.COM (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Make & .cshrc
Message-ID: <68801@sun.uucp>
Date: 17 Sep 88 09:11:45 GMT
References: <452@alice.marlow.uucp> <67870@sun.uucp> <67925@sun.uucp> <24946@ccicpg.UUCP>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
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> I personally like this feature/misfeature, as it allows me to invoke ksh.

Fine.  Plenty of other people don't like it, because it causes makefiles to
exhibit incorrect behavior when invoked by users with shells other than the
Bourne shell.  There is, admittedly, a workaround/fix for this - namely,
putting "SHELL=/bin/sh" at the beginning of all your makefiles - but it's still
kind of impolite to require people to change their makefiles in this fashion,
especially if you don't tell them they have to do this.

Now, maybe you rate your convenience above the convenience of those other
people.  I suspect those other people would rate things differently, and in
general "don't gratuitously break things" is considered a good rule.

> Certainly for makefiles which I intend to be portable, I only use sh
> commands, but for my own development I use commands/scripts which need
> ksh.

I tend to doubt that there are many Makefiles or shell scripts that absolutely
*NEED* ksh.  There are many that might be more *convenient* to write using
"ksh", but I suspect they can all be done without Korn shell features.

I suggest you learn to do your development without using those features in your
scripts.  I use the Korn shell as my shell, but I make a point of *not* using
Korn shell features in scripts and the like, because I have no idea whether
somebody else will have the Korn shell available to them.

The fact that some feature might be convenient to you hardly proves that it is,
to quote your summary line, "Not a misfeature".