As many are probably aware, Bash 4.2 adds a shopt feature to enable not
running the last command of a pipeline in a subshell (POSIX leaves it up to
the shell to decide). Aside from being a slight optimization, it allows some
syntactic convenience such as reduced reliance upon process substitutions and
redundant command grouping workarounds. I believe it is generally considered
that the lastpipe behavior is superior. zsh and ksh do this by default, while
mksh, bash, and dash do not. Only Bash has it as a configurable option.
If it were made a policy now that ebuilds and eclasses cannot depend upon the
subshell (for example, to set temporary positional parameters or isolate
temporary variables), then maybe someday in the distant future this could be
made the default, and in the meantime, an option for those with new enough
shells. Since dependence on the subshell isn't very common, I think this
should be feasible, and of course as a workaround all that's required is to
wrap any such commands in parentheses.
lastpipe
