Weigh merits of (not) setting EMXSHELL by default.

[ataylor]

My latest yum update of all packages caused EMXSHELL to be set in CONFIG.SYS (to sh.exe).

This caused my customary shell (YAOS) to, simply put, break horribly until I removed the setting.

I'm not certain what the practical purpose of this setting is, but apparently it replaces CMD as the command processor for programs launched by EMX applications. This seems like an extremely dangerous thing to do by default.

EMX-based applications are still widespread, and many users would be at a loss to fix breakage caused by this setting.

I would recommend that EMXSHELL not be defined by default (or at least not to anything other than CMD.EXE).

[ataylor]

With further testing, the other *SHELL variables also seem to cause severe problems here (at least with GCC 3.3.5 and make 2.81).

Having MAKESHELL defined causes many makefile definitions that use backslashes to fail. Removing MAKESHELL and leaving the other shells defined here causes a reproducible system trap (either black screen showing trap 000e, or a hard hang requiring power off). Removing all *SHELL variables resolved these problems.

I realize this is probably highly system dependent, but the point is that there's clearly a risk that setting these variables will cause severe problems to a user's system if they have not been using these variables previously.

[Silvan Scherrer]

it seems you are still the only one who had issues with those settings. At least we did not hear anything else so far. Due to that fact we are not changing or removing the settings.