Re: [Bashburn-info] 2nd try: I have a bash compatibility question (fwd)

[Markus K. <mar...@on...>]

Steven W. Orr wrote:
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2008 16:48:25
> From: Steven W. Orr <st...@sy...>
> To: bashburn <Bas...@li...>
> Subject: I have a bash compatibility question
>
> What version of bash do we support? I run 3.0 here at home (currently) and at 
> work I happen to have 3.2. Do we have to support version 2 or are my 
> presumptions about 3 ok to be making?
>
>   
Hm, Steven have you a special reason why we should support bash >= 3.0 ?
I first thought we should support bash versions which are older than 3.0 
if we have no special reason. But then I searched and found this:

Bash-3.0 contained the following new features:

o Features to support the bash debugger have been implemented, and there
  is a new `extdebug' option to turn the non-default options on

o HISTCONTROL is now a colon-separated list of options and has been
  extended with a new `erasedups' option that will result in only one
  copy of a command being kept in the history list

o Brace expansion has been extended with a new {x..y} form, producing
  sequences of digits or characters

o Timestamps are now kept with history entries, with an option to save
  and restore them from the history file; there is a new HISTTIMEFORMAT
  variable describing how to display the timestamps when listing history
  entries

o The `[[' command can now perform extended regular expression (egrep-like)
  matching, with matched subexpressions placed in the BASH_REMATCH array
  variable

o A new `pipefail' option causes a pipeline to return a failure status if
  any command in it fails

o The `jobs', `kill', and `wait' builtins now accept job control notation
  in their arguments even if job control is not enabled

o The `gettext' package and libintl have been integrated, and the shell
  messages may be translated into other languages


So, since we want to use gettext (in bashburn version 3) we have to use 
bash version >= 3.0. Or am I wrong?

By the way - what does everyone think - should we use unicode (UTF8) for 
encoding the translations in bashburn 3?
This also means we have to switch console to unicode ("unicode_start")?

Markus