[cfarm-users] Automated deployment across multiple cfarm hosts

[Denis Ovsienko]

On Sun, 15 Sep 2024 15:39:18 +0000
Peter Gutmann via cfarm-users <cfarm-users at lists.tetaneutral.net> wrote:

> (OK, it's not quite that bad, but several things are pre-Posix at
> least, e.g. /bin/sh doesn't understand "$(...)" but requires `...`).

I ran into this particular thing after following the advice of
shellcheck and replacing `` with $(), which promptly broke the script
on Solaris 10, which is supposed to be POSIX-compliant, at least in the
shell department.  As far as I remember, eventually the explanation was
that in Solaris before 11 /bin/sh conformed to an older version of POSIX
that does not have $().  So my script ended up using `` again and
disabling shellcheck warning SC2006.  Similarly, you do not find
mktemp(1) in Solaris 9 and AIX 7.x.

On your earlier note of "I need to support stuff going back years if
not decades", that's usually a very time-consuming work, so a project
maintainer needs to know where to stop.  As far as resource-constrained
open source community/hobby projects usually go, it is reasonable to
require that there is someone else to keep an old system alive and
available for the developers.  The main reason Solaris 10 and AIX
builds of tcpdump and libpcap work (or at least have a detailed bug
report when that's not the case) is because OpenCSW and CFarm keep
respective hosts running.

-- 
    Denis Ovsienko