October 22, 2012

Where to get checkbashisms from (community service)

Lately I've been spending some time checking the Debian archive for bashisms in preparation of the release of Debian wheezy. This requires running checkbashisms against every /bin/sh script, checking the results by hand to discard some false positives, and filing bug reports of bashisms.
And of course, fixing and improving checkbashisms; some of that work to be published soon.

It is fun that when one fixes some parsing errors it leads to regressions in the form of false negatives due to other parsing errors... oh well.

However, while looking around the web for references about checkbashisms, I noticed that somebody created a sourceforge project under that same name. It is a fork of an old version of checkbashisms, and hasn't seen an update in over a year. It even appears that a FreeBSD port is based on it.

If you are looking for the latest checkbashisms, please get it either from the latest version of devscripts, or from devscripts' git repository.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for this; I was wondering why the most easy-to-find copy of checkbashisms I could find online was so out of date!

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    1. There are already some improvements and bug fixes in git. They should make their way into the next version of devscripts that isn't aimed at Debian wheezy.

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