[bug#81040] [PATCH] dist: introduce AM_OPTIONAL_AUTOMAKE for best-effort dist-XXX archives.

On 5/15/26 19:44, Karl Berry wrote:
> [...]
>
> - Finally, as for shells that don't support command -v, it seems fine to
> me to just silently fail on them. If a user of such ever cares, which
> seems highly unlikely to me, they can report the problem. However, the
> doc should mention this.
>
> Inserting that shell code to reimplement command -v seems annoyingly
> verbose. Also, it would need to use test instead of [ ... ], and use
> the usual x"$1" instead of bare "$1". Also, its test for absolute
> filenames will not work for all Windows paths. All in all, I'd much
> rather skip that whole thing than have to go through all the irritating
> special cases of finding executables for the millionth times.
>
> BTW, I was surprised to find that at least some Solaris 10 /bin/sh
> *does* support command -v.  portal.cfarm.net has one Solaris 10 system
> still hanging on, cfarm210.cfarm.net, which is where I tried it.

If I remember correctly, on some systems, the /bin/sh shell does not 
have command(1) as a builtin, but a "command" executable exists on the 
filesystem.

As long as `make dist-XYZ` will always either produce the "XYZ" dist or 
fail, we probably do not need to worry about this edge case.


-- Jacob