Re: BSD_ECHO

[Zoltan Hidvegi <hzoli@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Richard wrote:
[...]
> > I still object to having a configure test for the default behavior of
> > BSD_ECHO when run as "sh".  This should NOT be something that varies
> > from one installation to the next!
[...]
> I completely agree...
> 
> The options for zsh when called as sh, should not depend on
> your current configuration.  It is especially bad for us sysadmins
> who work on heterogenous environments.... I don't want zsh working
> one way on one machine, and another way on another machine.

Seing the big opposition I'll remove that configure check.  However this
was not a completely unreasonable change.  I use zsh as /bin/sh on Linux
where the default /bin/sh is bash.  I bet that without BSD_ECHO some
scripts will break.

On the other hand someone else reported that on an other system zsh broke
some scripts because of BSD_ECHO.  It is possible to turn on BSD_ECHO iff
zsh is invoked as /bin/sh (with full pathname) and configure detected that
/bin/sh use BSD_ECHO but it would not be set by emulate or alternatively is
would be always set or unset by emulate.  On systems where zsh is installed
as /bin/sh the system administrator probably knows enough about how to set
the desired default and others won't be affected by this change.

I know that prefect solution is not possible.  Even POSIX did not dare to
define the default echo behaviour.  If one wants to write a portable script
it must begin with something like #! /usr/local/bin/zsh -f.  We have 7
different OS'es in an NFS/NIS network where zsh is very useful as portable
script language (and as a login shell of course).

Zoltan