FW: shell choice freebsd git port

[Wesley Shields]

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?

-- WXS

----- 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).

-Peff

----- End forwarded message -----