Proposal: use bash on windows for configure

[msarahan]

Allowing variable overrides in batch scripts is hairy because of the need for complicated startlocal enabledelayedexpansion stuff. It makes our scripts fragile and limits the number of people who are willing to work on them. I propose that we cut configure.cmd completely, and run configure.sh on all platforms.

What this requires is the use of msys2 or git for windows. WSL is not useful here, it behaves like a linux system for the sake of our scripts instead of a bash-on-windows thing.

We clearly can't require this on end user systems for our quarto.cmd script. This proposal is only for development. The quarto.cmd script doesn't present the same override headaches anyway, so it's not a big deal there.

I will put up a PR showing that configure.sh can run fine on windows. If that is satisfactory, then maybe we can consider removing configure.cmd.

[cderv]

Just asking naively, does using powershell .ps1 script on Windows instead of BATCH .cmd script allows from more flexibility for configuration ? I tend to write all my new scripting on windows for powershell instead of CMD.

Happy to test any configure.sh script as I am working on Windows.

Also a note, R for Windows project includes a Msys2: https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/rtools42/rtools.html
Won't be useful, this is also available to any developers using also R generally.

[msarahan]

powershell would certainly be better than .cmd. I feel like bash is even better because:

1. It doesn't require any language switching at all
2. There's no synchronization issue between platforms - if you change setup on linux, it will carry over to windows without additional effort
3. I think bash is more widely known/used in our community than powershell. Perhaps I am only saying my own experience, though. I grew up on batch scripts on windows and bash scripts on linux. I never really picked up powershell.

This said, I'll joyfully learn more powershell if people think that's the right way forward here. I just like the consolidation aspect of using only the .sh files.

[cderv]

Thanks for sharing your views !

I think bash is more widely known/used in our community than powershell. Perhaps I am only saying my own experience, though. I grew up on batch scripts on windows and bash scripts on linux. I never really picked up powershell.

I agree with you for dev users. Bash for Windows seems definitely a good idea if everything is working smoothly. I know in the past I encountered some configuration and environment issues, but nothing not manageable.
Any windows developer would have a Git bash available so that is ok to use that.

More generally on Windows, bash is not available by default when you don't have git. So scripting in powershell is more generic to most users. Initially I was thinking of rewriting some of the script in this project from .cmd to .ps1.
But as you suggested the target here is the developers for a configure. .sh will be maintainable by more people than powershell.
So we should go for it with the configure.

[cscheid]

I'm going to go ahead and close this one - if we move away from powershell, it will likely be to a setup where our configuration happens with a minimal bootstrapping process and then running a Deno script (or Rust command), or something.

Independently of tooling like shellcheck, our configuration is now too complicated for a shell script. If we're going to change it, I want it to be a real programming language with such early 80s features as type checking :)