Re: 1,000 year backward compatability of tools

"John W. Eaton" <jwe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> even Ultrix had another shell, /bin/sh5, if I remember correctly,
> that did support shell functions, and it would not have been too
> difficult for configure to attempt to find it

Recent versions of Autoconf generate "configure" scripts that do just
that, which is partly why I'm not so worried about the shell-function
issue even for Ultrix.  This also may help to explain why new
"configure" start up so slowly on older boxes -- you don't get this
functionality for free, unfortunately.

Do you recall whether /bin/sh5 was a standard part of Ultrix and was
installed on every Ultrix machine?  If /bin/sh5 was an option and
might not be installed, then there still might be an issue here.