Re: define _prefix in *.spec

[Chris Adams <cmadams hiwaay net>]

Once upon a time, Jim Knoble <jmknoble@pobox.com> said:
> Bash-masquerading-as-/bin/sh still does do stuff like:
> 
>   - Perform curly-brace expansion (e.g., /bin/{ls,cp,mv,rm}), unless
>     it's turned off with a bash-specific shell option.

This is the primary problem I've had.  For example, the RHL 7.2 pine RPM
had:

for n in pine pico pilot; do
    install -c -m 755 -s bin/$n $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/usr/bin/$n
done

For the errata, someone decided it was "better" to do:

install -m 755 bin/{pine,pico,pilot,rpdump,rpload} $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/usr/bin/

Why?  There is no good reason not to use the more portable loop.

And they didn't fix the real problem: the use of /usr/bin instead of
%{_prefix}/bin or even better %{_bindir}. :-)

> At the risk of repeating myself, the whole shell thing is a total mess.
> Everyone should use rc <http://freshmeat.net/projects/rc/> for
> scripting instead.  It's BSD-licensed, and the quoting rules are far
> easier to understand....

Please, not YASL (yet another scripting language), which would mean YARD
(yet another RPM dependency).  The syntax for sh is part of POSIX and
the Single Unix Specification (although it is not required to be
/bin/sh, just that it is called "sh").  How many modern systems don't
have a POSIX sh somewhere on the system (Tru64 /bin/sh isn't fully
POSIX, but /usr/bin/posix/sh is).
-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams@hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.