From atossava at cc.helsinki.fi  Wed Apr 29 11:55:44 2009
From: atossava at cc.helsinki.fi (Atro Tossavainen)
Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:55:44 +0300 (EEST)
Subject: [Rd] Problems building R 2.9.0... on SGI and Sun once again
Message-ID: <200904290955.n3T9ti6H016943@ruuvi.it.helsinki.fi>

(This is really in response to Peter Dalgaard, not to myself)

> This seems to come from constructions of the form
> 
> for i in $FOO : do .... ; done
> 
> If $FOO is empty, then the resulting "for i in ;" is a syntax error
> with some versions of bash and sh.

Given that one should generally be writing scripts for the Bourne
shell, it is IMHO the case that "for i in ;" is a syntax error, period.

> Current Linux versions of bash do not have that behaviour.

...violating Bourne shell compatibility in yet another way...

> One workaround could be to upgrade bash.

If R is to be an application that is not specific to (recent distributions
of) Linux, one should expect and code for systems that may not have bash
at all but only the Bourne shell.

> Another workaround could be to safeguard the for-loop with
> 
> test "$FOO" != "" && for i in $FOO : do .... ; done
> 
> in all of the Makefiles where this can be an issue.

That is one of the possible ways in which R developers could, I
suppose, address the issue.

-- 
Atro Tossavainen (Mr.)               / The Institute of Biotechnology at
Systems Analyst, Techno-Amish &     / the University of Helsinki, Finland,
+358-9-19158939  UNIX Dinosaur     / employs me, but my opinions are my own.
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[Rd] Problems building R 2.9.0... on SGI and Sun once again
Atro Tossavainen