On Thu, 24 Mar 2005, Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
> For example, security/pinepgp wants bash.

As far as I can tell, it would work with a POSIX sh if the configure
script just stopped insisting on bash.

> And misc/openoffice wants a tcsh.

Making this work with sh would be a lot of work, but appears to be feasible.

> It seems like some Linux and new Mac OS users would not like bash
> reinstall or FreeBSD user would not want tcsh being reinstalled for this.
> (I don't care much about that since I use bash from pkgsrc, but on
> FreeBSD, I do use tcsh from /bin.)
>
> Any thoughts on this? How would you do this? Maybe builtin.mk file?

Yes, if there is already a native bash or a native tcsh, then pkgsrc
bash or tcsh should not be installed.  A builtin.mk file seems like a
sensible way of dealing with this.

It would be nice if packages could say things like "needs a shell with
this list of features and without this list of known bugs", and let
the builtin.mk framework make decisions like "NetBSD /bin/sh is OK",
"Solaris /bin/sh is not OK, but Solaris ksh is OK", "bash>=1.2.3.4 is
OK".  In the case of pinepgp on NetBSD, I'd like the decision to be
"native /bin/sh is OK".

--apb (Alan Barrett)