[Buildroot] 2016.11-rc2 with really old versions of bash (RHEL5)

[Ricardo Martincoski]

Thomas De Schampheleire,
Max Filippov,

Do you see the issue described below? Maybe I am doing something wrong.
What bash version do you have in your RHEL5 servers?

All,

Ancient versions of bash don't support 'Associative arrays', leading to build
error using 2016.11-rc2 in a plain vanilla RHEL5.
Please notice EOL of RHEL5 is 31 Mar 2017 [1].
Currently the manual does not specify a minimum version of bash [2].

This is NOT my use case!
I was just testing some unrelated stuff in a VM and came across it.
I didn't tested the obvious workaround (installing a newer bash) but it should
work.

See below the logs for RHEL5 (error) and RHEL6 (ok).

[ricardo at centos5 buildroot-2016.11-rc2]$ grep release /etc/issue        
CentOS release 5.11 (Final)
[ricardo at centos5 buildroot-2016.11-rc2]$ bash --version | grep bash
GNU bash, version 3.2.25(1)-release (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu)
[ricardo at centos5 buildroot-2016.11-rc2]$ make -s defconfig
support/scripts/br2-external: line 6: declare: -A: invalid option
declare: usage: declare [-afFirtx] [-p] [name[=value] ...]
Makefile:188: /home/ricardo/buildroot-2016.11-rc2/output/.br-external.mk: No such file or directory
make[1]: Failed to remake makefile `/home/ricardo/buildroot-2016.11-rc2/output/.br-external.mk'.
support/scripts/br2-external: line 6: declare: -A: invalid option
declare: usage: declare [-afFirtx] [-p] [name[=value] ...]
make[1]: *** [/home/ricardo/buildroot-2016.11-rc2/output/build/.br2-external.in] Error 2
make: *** [_all] Error 2

[ricardo at centos6 buildroot-2016.11-rc2]$ grep release /etc/issue        
CentOS release 6.8 (Final)
[ricardo at centos6 buildroot-2016.11-rc2]$ bash --version | grep bash
GNU bash, version 4.1.2(1)-release (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu)
[ricardo at centos6 buildroot-2016.11-rc2]$ make -s defconfig
#
# configuration written to /home/ricardo/buildroot-2016.11-rc2/.config
#

[1] https://wiki.centos.org/Download
[2] http://nightly.buildroot.org/manual.html#requirement-mandatory

Regards,
Ricardo