Jean Delvare wrote: > Hi Gary, Salut!
> [Gary V. Vaughan]
>
>>(...) Long term, I'd like to try and
>>remove the dependency on coreutils altogether... depending on bash is
>>fine, perl not so bad, coreutils bearable, but GNU sed, GNU awk, GNU
>>getopt (and any others that may creep in) is unnecessary. The larger
>>the dependency stack, the harder it is to install on non-Linux.
>
> I don't quite agree. OK, sometimes removing dependencies on
> Linux-specific features or tools is easy and wanted, just like Andreas
> did with tac. However, some platforms come with core utils that have
> very, very poor command line interfaces, so hoping to get quilt to work
> with these out of the box promises large code rewrites and bad
> consequences on the code size, readability and maintenability.
Oh there are certainly pathological cases that should be avoided. But
oftentimes adding a line or two of extra code to remove a dependency is
a win overall. AIX will likely prove really hard to port to for
example, without first having to port GNU getopt, gawk, GNU sed,
coreutils and finding a perl package.
If it turns out to be easy to fall back to something else (or just do
something differently to save that pain), it increases the potential
audience of a project.
> Writing a shell-based tool is hard enough with quality core utils, it
> sounds like a very bad trip with poor ones, so we are probably not going
> anywhere trying to strip every util's use down to the common set of
> options - which I repeat will be very thin if the set of platforms is
> large.
ACK. My viewpoint is probably quite skewed after so many years of
working around various vendor Bourne shell bugs with libtool...
> So it sounds reasonable to me to have quilt depend on reasonably
> advanced utils. People who want to use quilt have to install these
> utils, it's not that hard. If you don't want quilt to depend on
> anything, the way to go is a rewrite in perl or python, as was suggested
> in another thread.
ACK.
Cheers,
Gary.
--
Gary V. Vaughan ())_. [EMAIL PROTECTED],gnu.org}
Research Scientist ( '/ http://tkd.kicks-ass.net
GNU Hacker / )= http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool
Technical Author `(_~)_ http://sources.redhat.com/autobook
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