\"special\" shells a security hole?

[guy at gorodish.UUCP]

>If I want to use Korn shell constructs in my Makefile, then
>there ought to be a general, clean way of doing it, such as
>"SHELL=/bin/ksh".

That ain't general - the Korn shell is in "/usr/local/ksh" on my
machine, and there may not *be* a Korn shell on other machines (which
means there *is* no general way to use Korn shell constructs in your
Makefile - period).

Furthermore, it is a botch to *import* SHELL from the environment;
this causes Makefiles to work differently for people with different
login shells!  "make" should NOT import SHELL; if people insist on
being able to use other shells, perhaps it should allow you to change
SHELL from within the Makefile and ONLY from within the Makefile.